A Novel Approach to Solve K-Center Problems with Geographical Placement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new heuristic for the NP-hard K-center problem focused on geographical placement, demonstrating improved performance through simulation across various scenarios.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel heuristic method for the K-center problem, enhancing placement strategies for facilities in logistics and related domains.

Findings

Significant improvement over existing approaches

Effective in diverse geographical scenarios

Applicable to multiple domains like military, content delivery, and warehousing

Abstract

The facility location problem is a well-known challenge in logistics that is proven to be NP-hard. In this paper we specifically simulate the geographical placement of facilities to provide adequate service to customers. Determining reasonable center locations is an important challenge for a management since it directly effects future service costs. Generally, the objective is to place the central nodes such that all customers have convenient access to them. We analyze the problem and compare different placement strategies and evaluate the number of required centers. We use several existing approaches and propose a new heuristic for the problem. For our experiments we consider various scenarios and employ simulation to evaluate the performance of the optimization algorithms. Our new optimization approach shows a significant improvement. The presented results are generally applicable to many domains, e.g., the placement of military bases, the planning of content delivery networks, or the placement of warehouses.