A Hybrid BRKGA Approach for the Two Stage Capacitated Facility Location Problem

Finding optimal locations for installing factories and warehouses, fulfilling customers' demand is the goal of the Two-Stage Capacitated Facility Location, which compounds a supply chain class of problems. Besides locating factories and warehouses, the problem's objective is to minimize the operational costs: opening facilities and product flow, satisfying customer demand, and without disregarding the capacity of factories and warehouses. A Hybrid Biased Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (HBRKGA), combining BRKGA with Local Search and Local Branching, was proposed to solve the problem. The computational experiments showed that the method was reliable and stood out among other approaches to the problem.