Traditional and self-adaptive differential evolution for the p-median problem

Abstract

The p-median problem is an established combinatorial optimization problem with several alternative formulations and a number of real-world applications in areas such as operational research and planning. It has been also used as a testbed for many heuristic and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. Recently, it was shown that a simple, traditional, variant of the differential evolution algorithm is able to solve certain p-median problem instances on a competitive level. This work compares the performance of the traditional differential evolution with two adaptive variants of this algorithm on several well-known p-median problem instances.