A simulated annealing-based hybrid algorithm for solving UFL problems

Hybridisation of algorithms to develop efficient solution methods for solving various NP-hard problems has been a practice for the last few years. It can be seen that researchers have tried different permutations and combinations of various exact, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms to develop better solution methods than the existing ones. In this study we present a hybrid algorithm for solving the uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problems and the results obtained are compared with some recent algorithms available in the literature. The proposed hybrid algorithm is based on the two popular metaheuristic algorithms, namely, simulated annealing (SA) and genetic algorithm (GA). Empirical evidences to prove the effectiveness of the algorithm is also presented in this paper.