A cooperative and self-adaptive metaheuristic for the facility location problem

This paper presents a coalition-based metaheuristic (CBM) to solve the uncapacitated facility location problem. CBM is a population-based metaheuristic where individuals encapsulate a single solution and are considered as agents. In comparison to classical evolutionary algorithms, these agents have additional capacities of decision, learning and cooperation. Our approach is also a case study to present how concepts from multiagent systems' domain may contribute to the design of new metaheuristics. The tackled problem is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem, namely the uncapacitated facility location problem, that consists in determining the sites in which some facilities must be set up to satisfy the requirements of a client set at minimum cost. A computational experiment is conducted to test the performance of learning mechanisms and to compare our approach with several existing metaheuristics. The results showed that CBM is competitive with powerful heuristics approaches and presents several advantages in terms of flexibility and modularity.