Mahdi Bashiri - Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
Farshid Samaei - Shahed University, Tehran, Iran

The location-routing problem (LRP) is a research area within locational analysis, with the distinguishing property of paying special attention to underlying issues of vehicle routing. It belongs to the class of NP-hard problems so many heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms have been developed in order to find anear optimal solution. For using meta-heuristic approach, we need a solution representation. In this paper, we propose a newsolution representation scheme for the LRP. The computational results for some selected datasets show that the proposed solution representation outperforms existing approaches. The results show that the search performance has been improved about 10.07% in average. Moreover the analysis shows that the proposed cyclic solution representation has more efficiency when the location decision is more sensitive.

Location-routing problem, Simulated annealing, Meta-heuristic, Representation scheme