A heuristic approach to the single facility maximin location problem

Abstract

The problem of determining the optimum location for a single undesirable machine within an existing plant layout is considered. The degree of undesirability between an existing machine or worker and the new machine is reflected through a weighting factor. The problem is defined to be the selection of a location witbin a convex region that maximizes the minimum weighted Euclidean distance with respect to all the existing facilities. A model is formulated and an algorithm developed. As the number of existing facilities increases, however, the computation time increases substantially. A heuristic approach hased on partial enumeration is described. This approach makes it possible to study problems that involve a large number of existing facilities without sacrificing the level of accuracy. The two approaches, exact and heuristic, are compared with respect to their computational efficiency. An example is solved using both approaches.