Solution of asymmetric discrete competitive facility location problems using ranking of candidate locations

We address a discrete competitive facility location problem with an asymmetric objective function and a binary customer choice rule. Both an integer linear programming formulation and a heuristic optimization algorithm based on ranking of candidate locations are designed to solve the problem. The proposed population-based heuristic algorithm is specially adapted for the discrete facility location problems by using their features such as geographical distances and the maximal possible utility of candidate locations, which can be evaluated in advance. The performance of the proposed algorithm was experimentally investigated by solving different instances of the model with real data of municipalities in Spain.