A branch-and-price approach for the continuous multifacility monotone ordered median problem

Abstract

In this paper, we address the Continuous Multifacility Monotone Ordered Median Problem. The goal of this problem is to locate facilities in minimizing a monotone ordered weighted median function of the distances between given demand points and its closest facility. We propose a new branch-and-price procedure for this problem, and three families of matheuristics based on: solving heuristically the pricer problem, aggregating the demand points, and discretizing the decision space. We give detailed discussions of the validity of the exact formulations and also specify the implementation details of all the solution procedures. Besides, we assess their performances in an extensive computational experience that shows the superiority of the branch-and-price approach over the compact formulation in medium-sized instances. To handle larger instances it is advisable to resort to the matheuristics that also report rather good results.