An Algorithm for the M-Median Plant Location Problem

The problem is to locate a given number of plants along a road network so as to minimize the total distance between plants and warehouses assigned to them. It is modeled as an integer programming problem and the relaxed LP is solved by decomposition. In cases of noninteger termination, the ILP is attacked using group theoretics and a dynamic programming recursion. Computational results are given, which contrast this procedure to a branch-and-bound approach.