Meta heuristic approaches with P-median problem

Facility location problem has been one of the most popular issues from past to present as long-term and strategic decisions for businesses. In general, the purpose of choosing the facility location is to determine the most suitable location of the facility that will serve the customers. P- median problem is one of the combinatorial problem types in difficult problem class. In the thesis, meta heuristic algorithms, which are one of the solution methods, are investigated by defining the p-median problem. In the second part, detailed information is given about the approaches which are important in the literature such as genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, tabu search algorithm and ant colony algorithm. In the third part, genetic algorithm is used to solve p-median problem. The parameters of the genetic algorithm were determined and the performance of the algorithm was evaluated with the p-median test problems of various sizes in the OR-Library problem set.