1. ¹Boaziçi University, stanbul, Turkey
2. ²Casual Male Retail Group Inc., Canton, MA, USA

Correspondence: N Aras, Department of Industrial Engineering, Boaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. E-mail: arasn@boun.edu.tr

Received March 2005; Accepted May 2006; Published online 18 October 2006.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the capacitated multi-facility Weber problem with rectilinear distance. This problem is concerned with locating m capacitated facilities in the Euclidean plane to satisfy the demand of n customers with the minimum total transportation cost. The demand and location of each customer are known a priori and the transportation cost between customers and facilities is proportional to the rectilinear distance separating them. We first give a new mixed integer linear programming formulation of the problem by making use of a well-known necessary condition for the optimal facility locations. We then propose new heuristic solution methods based on this formulation. Computational results on benchmark instances indicate that the new methods can provide very good solutions within a reasonable amount of computation time.