SOLVING LOCATION-ALLOCATION PROBLEMS WITH RECTILINEAR DISTANCES BY STIMULATED ANNEALING

The objective of this study is to use the simulated annealing method t o solve minisum location-allocation problems with rectilinear distance s. The major advantage of the simulated annealing method is that it is a very general and efficient algorithm for solving combinatorial opti mization problems with known objective functions. In this study, a sim ulated annealing algorithm was developed to solve the location-allocat ion problems, and its performance was compared with two other popular methods for solving location-allocation problems. The results show tha t simulated annealing is a good alternative to the two methods, as mea sured by both the solution quality and the computational time.