Line-up competition algorithm for location-allocation problem

This paper presents Line-up competition algorithm to solve location-allocation problems, which are attributed to the mixed integer nonlinear program problems. The proposed method is very efficient for mixed integer nonlinear problems by balancing local search and global search for continuous variable space and integer variable space simultaneously. In this study, some contraction strategies are adopted to contract the search spaces for two different variable spaces, which can speed up algorithm converge steadily to attain optimal or near-optimal solutions. The proposed method was tested with a larger scale location-allocation problem encountered in oil production. Results show that solutions obtained are superior to those obtained by a hybrid algorithm in literature in both solution quality and computational time.