A Hybrid BRKGA Approach for the Multiproduct Two Stage Capacitated Facility Location Problem

This paper presents a hybrid BRKGA (MP-HBRKGA), that combines BRKGA with a Local Branching technique, to solve the multiproduct two-stage capacitated facility location problem (MP-TSCFLP). In this problem, a set of different products has to be transported from a set of factories, passing through a set of depots (first stage) and then transported to a set of customers (second stage). The goal in the MP-TSCFLP is to minimize the opening and transportation costs, where each kind of product has its own transportation cost per unit transported. Recent hybrid methods have been successfully applied to facility location problems, therefore, in this paper we propose adaptations of such hybrid methods and implement the MP-HBRKGA for handling the multiproduct characteristic. To the best of our knowledge, such hybrid BRKGA presented the best results for the single-product problem and have not yet been applied to solve the problem with multiple products. Computational experiments compare the obtained results to those in the literature, using four sets, with different characteristics, of large-sized instances, proposed in the literature.