Less is more: discrete starting solutions in the planar p-median problem

Pawel Kalczynski (), Jack Brimberg () and Zvi Drezner ()
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Pawel Kalczynski: California State University-Fullerton
Jack Brimberg: The Royal Military College of Canada
Zvi Drezner: California State University-Fullerton

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, 2022, vol. 30, issue 1, No 2, 34-59

Abstract: Abstract This paper examines the performance of improvement search as a function of the quality of the starting solution in the planar (or continuous) p-median problem. We show that using optimal solutions of the analogue discrete p-median problem as the starting solution for heuristic improvement algorithms, as recommended in the literature, can actually lead to inferior performance. That is, good starting solutions obtained in the discrete space with a fraction of the effort can actually be better, a counter-intuitive result that illustrates in a different context the less is more principle recently advocated in the literature.

Keywords: Multiple facility location; P-median; Starting solutions; Heuristics; 90B85; 90C59; 46N10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s11750-021-00599-w

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