An Efficient Hybrid CS and K-Means Algorithm for the Capacitated PMedian Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm combining Cuckoo Search and K-Means to efficiently solve the capacitated p-median problem, demonstrating superior results over existing methods on benchmark tests.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid meta-heuristic approach for CPMP, integrating Cuckoo Search with K-Means, and validates its effectiveness through benchmark comparisons.

Findings

Outperforms existing algorithms on benchmark problems.

Achieves better solutions within reasonable computational time.

Improves several test samples over known solutions.

Abstract

Capacitated p-median problem (CPMP) is an important variation of facility location problem in which p capacitated medians are economically selected to serve a set of demand vertices so that the total assigned demand to each of the candidate medians must not exceed its capacity. This paper surveys and analyses the combination of Cuckoo Search and K-Means algorithms to solve the CPMP. In order to check for quality and validity of the suggestive method, we compared the final solution produced over the two test problems of Osman and Christofides, each of which including 10 sample tests. According to the results, the suggested meta-heuristic algorithm shows superiority over the rest known algorithms in this field as all the best known solutions in the first problem set, and several sample sets in the second problem set have been improved within reasonable periods of time.