A multi-exchange heuristic for the single source capacitated facility location problem

This paper presents a very large scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithm for the capacitated facility location problem with single-source constraints. The neighborhood structures are induced by customer multi-exchanges and by facility moves. We consider both single-customer multi-exchanges, detected on a suitably defined customer improvement graph, and multi-customer multi-exchanges, detected on a facility improvement graph dynamically built through the use of a greedy scheme. Computational results for some benchmark instances are reported, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for solving large-scale problems