A partial dual algorithm for the capacitated warehouse location problem (Q1067966)

The Capacitated Warehouse Location Problem (CWLP) consists of the ordinary transportation problem with the additional feature of a fixed cost associated with each supplier. A supplier can be used towards meeting the demands of the customers only if the corresponding fixed cost is incurred. The problem is to determine which suppliers to use and how the customer demands should be met, so that total cost is minimised. Most of the recently published algorithms, for CWLP use branch and bound based on a Lagrangian relaxation of demand constraints. Here, a partial dual of a tight LP formulation is used in order to take advantage of the properties of transportation problems. Computational results are given which show good overall performance of the algorithm, with the size of the tree search being reduced compared with previous published results.