Tabu based heuristics for the generalized hierarchical covering location problem

The classical Hierarchical Covering Location Problem (HCLP) is the problem to find locations maximizing the number of covered customers, where the customers are assumed to be covered if they are located within a specific distance from the facility, and not covered otherwise. In the generalized HCLP (G-HCLP), customers asking a certain level of services can be served by the facility whose level is equal or the higher. The service coverage is also generalized in a way that the partial coverage is allowed if the distance from the facility is larger than the specified range although it is located in the covered distance. The locations and the levels of the facilities are to be determined, and their set of customers to serve is to be decided as well. Mixed integer programming formulation and the solution procedure using meta-heuristics is developed, and it is shown that suggested heuristic yields high quality solution in a reasonable computation time.