Commercial Territory Design for a Distribution Firm with New Constructive and Destructive Heuristics
- DOI
- 10.1080/18756891.2012.670526How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Combinatorial optimization, territory design, location-allocation heuristics, GRASP
- Abstract
A commercial territory design problem with compactness maximization criterion subject to territory balancing and connectivity is addressed. Four new heuristics based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures within a location-allocation scheme for this NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem are proposed. The first three (named GRLH1, GRLH2, and GRDL) build the territories simultaneously. Their construction phase consists of two parts: a location phase where territory seeds are identified, and an allocation phase where the remaining basic units are iteratively assigned to a territory. In contrast, the other heuristic (named SLA) builds the territories one at a time. Empirical results reveals that GRLH1 and GRLH2 find near-optimal or optimal solutions to relatively small instances, where exact solutions could be found. The proposed procedures are relatively fast. We carried out a comparison between the proposed heuristic procedures and the existing method in larger instances. It was observed the proposed heuristic GRLH1 produced competitive results with respect to the existing approach.
- Copyright
- © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - JOUR AU - Jaime Cano-Belmán AU - Roger Z. Ríos-Mercado AU - M. Angélica Salazar-Aguilar PY - 2012 DA - 2012/02/01 TI - Commercial Territory Design for a Distribution Firm with New Constructive and Destructive Heuristics JO - International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems SP - 126 EP - 147 VL - 5 IS - 1 SN - 1875-6883 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/18756891.2012.670526 DO - 10.1080/18756891.2012.670526 ID - Cano-Belmán2012 ER -