ABSTRACTIn this article, we present an empirical evaluation of a metaheuristic approach to a commercial districting problem. The problem consists of partitioning a given set of basic units into p districts in order to minimize a measure of territory dispersion. Additional constraints include territory connectivity and balancing with respect to several criteria. To obtain feasible solutions to this NP-hard problem, a reactive greedy randomized adaptive search metaheuristic procedure (GRASP) is used. Previous work addressed medium-scale instances. In this study, we report our computational experience when we addressed larger instances ressembling more closely the size of real-world instances. The empirical work includes full assessment of the algorithmic parameters and the local search phase, and a sensitivity analysis of the balance tolerance parameter in terms of solution quality and feasibility. The empirical evidence shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach and how this approach is significantly...
['Roger Z. Ríos-Mercado']
Assessing a Metaheuristic for Large-Scale Commercial Districting