A Comparison of Heuristic Methods for Service Facility Locations

Most segments of service industry are experiencing intense competition. Both researchers and practitioners have focused their attention on improving service operations. Proper location for a service facility is a major factor affecting the competitive position of a service operation. This article discusses the facility location problems and presents a simple heuristic that can be used to locate service facilities. The article reports the results of a simulation study which compared the performance of the proposed heuristic and another heuristic for locating service facilities with respect to computer processing time and explores how close the solutions are to the optimum solution. The results of the simulation indicate that the proposed heuristic is more efficient with respect to CPU time required to solve problems and gives more accurate results.