A genetic algorithm for the P-median problem

Facility-location problems have several applications in telecommunications, industrial transportation and distribution, etc. One of the most well-known facility-location problems is the p-median problem. This work addresses an application of the capacitated p-median problem to a real-world problem. We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the capacitated p-median problem. The proposed GA uses not only conventional genetic operators but also a new heuristic ''hypermutation'' operator proposed in this work. The proposed GA is compared with a tabu search algorithm.