Performance of heuristic and approximation algorithms for the uncapacitated facility location problem

The uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP) is a problem that has been studied intensively in operational research. Recently a variety of new deterministic and heuristic approximation algorithms have evolved. In this paper, we compare five new approaches to this problem - the JMS- and the MYZ-approximation algorithms, a version of local search, a Tabu Search algorithm as well as a version of the Volume algorithm with randomized rounding. We compare solution quality and running times on different standard benchmark instances. With these instances and additional material a web page was set up, where the material used in this study is accessible