Parallel Scatter Search Approach for the MinMax Regret Location Problem

In this paper we propose an efficient solving method based on a parallel scatter search algorithm that accelerates the search time to solve the minmax regret location problem. The algorithm was applied in the context of emergency management to locate emergency vehicles stations. A discrete event simulator was used to test the quality of the obtained solutions on the operational level. We compared the performance of the algorithm to an existing two stages method, and experiments show the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of quality of solution as well as the gain in computation time that could be obtained by parallelizing the proposed algorithm.