A modified simple heuristic for the p-median problem, with facilities design applications
Facilities design is closely related to efficient use of available resources. This paper presents a heuristic approach to solve two core problems of a good facilities design: facility location and facility layout. The latter group of problems will be solved for warehouse and production systems in particular. All these problems can be formulated as p-median clustering problems. Teitz and Bart (Oper. Res. 16 (1968) 955961) developed the vertex substitution method to solve those problems. This paper introduces effective improvements on this heuristic. The approach is tested on a large number of randomly generated cases and on problems taken from the literature. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
p-median facilities design heuristic approach clustering