Location Problem

Assoc. Prof. Charoenchai Khompatraporn, Ph.D.

KMUTT
Location Problem Example
• Position emergency services.
• Accessible in <= 10 mins
• Where to locate the site(s)?

Time to Potential Site (mins)

From
1 2 3 4 5 6
A 0 5 15 25 25 15
B 5 0 20 30 15 5
C 15 20 0 10 25 15
D 25 30 10 0 10 20
E 25 15 25 10 0 9
F 15 5 15 20 9 0
Example (cont)
Location Timely Accessible
Neighborhood
A 1,2
B 1,2,6
C
D
E
F
Formulation
• (Work in class)

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A Note on Decision Variables
• The more variables, the more space to search for the optimal solution → lead to
longer time to find the optimal solution.
• One more variable = one more axis of the search space.
• Indices are often use to increase the number of variables.
• Discrete problems (discrete variables) are sometimes called combinatorial
problems.
• Even a medium size problem (often determined by the number of variables), a
discrete problem may require a long time to find the optimal solution.

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A Note on Optimization
• Some transportation problems have a special structure that can be
formulated as a linear problem.
• Certain classes of linear programs can be difficult to solve. Most of the
linear programs though are no longer difficult to solve by a computer now.
• Non-linear programs generally are more difficult to solve than the linear
ones.
• Some special algorithms were developed to solve a certain class of
problems.

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 What makes an optimization problem
difficult?
• The number of decision variables
• The type of decision variables
• The number of constraints
• The number and type of the objective function(s)
• The type of equations involved

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 Metaheuristics
Assoc. Prof. Charoenchai Khompatraporn, Ph.D.
KMUTT

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Rationale
• Large nonlinear problems are often difficult to solve
• Real world applications usually fall into large-scale nonlinear type of
problems:
• Airline crew scheduling, Hospital staff scheduling
• Job scheduling, Production planning
• Dynamic vehicle routing problem
• Transportation-inventory problem
• Large structure design
• Chemical production process design
• There is limited time to find a “good-enough” solution to the problem
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Examples of Test Functions

Griewank Function (1981)

Branin Function (1978)

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Examples of Test Functions

Shubert Function (1985)

Michalewics Function

Ackley Function (1997)

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Procedure
Real Problem

Assumed Real Problem

Problem Formulation

Solution Method
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Solution Approach
• Exact solution, enumeration
• Pro: Yield the optimal solution (if find)
• Con: Could be time consuming
• Approximation
• Simulation
• Heuristics/Metaheuristics
• Pro: Could be reasonably fast (practical)
• Con: The best solution found may not be optimal

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Metaheuristic Design
• Exploration (global phase)
• Exploitation (local phase)

Exploitation

Exploration

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Examples of Metaheuristic Search
• Single solution method
• Simulated annealing (simulated quenching)
• Tabu search
• Greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP)
• Variable neighborhood search
• Population-based method
• Genetic algorithms
• Ant colony
• Artificial bee colony
• Particle swarm optimization
• Cuckoo search
• Bat algorithm
• Frog leaping algorithm
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Popular Stopping Criteria
• Time
• Number of iterations
• Relative improvement

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Ant Walk

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Traveling Salesman Application
Ant colony algorithm developing better solutions to TSP

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Pseudo-code ACO
procedure ACO_MetaHeuristic while(not_termination)
generateSolutions()
selectionActions()
pheromoneUpdate()
end while
end procedure

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Particle Swarm Basic Idea
xbest Where should
in group xnew be?

xnow

Bird flying formation

(May have many of groups like this in the search) 20
Particle Swarm
• Solution update:
xnew = xnow + vnew
• Velocity update:
vnew = c1*vnow
+ rand*c2*(xnow – xbest in group)
+ rand*c3*(xnow – xbest in population)

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General Procedure of Search Algorithms
1. Produce an initial feasible solution
2. While not terminate
1. Change to new region to look for candidate solution (if choose too) –
Exploration (Global) Phase
2. Generate a candidate solution
3. Do some local search (if choose too) – Exploitation (Local) Phase
4. Compare the quality of the new solution with the best-so-far solution
1. If better renew the best-so-far solution
5. Check if terminating condition is true
1. If yes STOP. If not, return in 2.1.
3. Report the best solution found

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Common Steps
• Construction
• Recombination
• Random modification: to modify current solution(s)
• Improvement: such as selection of good solution(s)
• Memory update: keep selected solution(s)
• Parameter update

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