Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

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Computers & Industrial Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/caie

Optimal mathematical programming for the warehouse location problem T

with Euclidean distance linearization
Meng You, Yiyong Xiao, Siyue Zhang, Pei Yang, Shenghan Zhou
⁎

School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The warehouse location problem (WLP) involves determining one (or multiple) locations as the materials/
Warehouse location problem products collecting/distributing centers for serving a group of customers scattered geographically in a region, at
Mixed-integer linear programming a minimum total transportation cost. The most conventional and widely used approach for solving the WLP is the
Clustering weighted k-means algorithm. However, this is not a global approach, because it always traps into local optima
Optimization
and is sensitive to the initial settings. Our numeric examples demonstrated that the solutions obtained by the
weighted k-means could depart from the optimal values by as much as 16.8% on average. In this paper, we
present an optimal programming approach based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) for the WLP,
which is irrelative to the initial solution and can be optimally solved by commercial solvers. For large-sized
datasets, we developed an MILP-based dynamic iterative partial optimization (MILP-DIPO) to search for the
near-optimal results with controllable computational time. Experiments on 14 datasets, including 6 small-sized
synthesized datasets and 8 variants of the known benchmark datasets in the UEF repository, were performed to
validate the proposed model and heuristics. The computational results confirm that improvements with the
proposed method could be as great as –22.9% (−14.0% on average) for small-sized datasets. For the eight
benchmark datasets, the MILP-DIPO algorithm delivered near-optimal solutions in a reasonable computational
time, with up to −8.0% (−2.6% on average) improvement compared to the results obtained by the conventional
weighted k-means algorithm.

1. Introduction type of clustering problem. An earlier version of WLP can be found in

The warehouse location problem (WLP) has an important role in the
cost-efficient operation of a logistics system. It can be briefly described
as how to identify the best locations for a number of dispatching/col-
lecting warehouse centers, to serve the surrounding customers at the
minimum transport cost measured by the total weighted distances be-
tween the customers and facility centers by the logistics volumes (i.e.,
demands). German scholar Alfred Weber first recognized the industrial
layout design as a continuous site selection problem, called the Weber
problem, which seeks to determine a point in the plane that minimizes
the sum of the transportation costs from this point to n destination
points (Friedrich, 1929). In the following years, the site selection pro-
blem has inspired several major variants such as the set covering pro-
blem, center location problem, and p-median problem (Brandeau &
Chiu, 1989; Wang, 2006).
The WLP has been frequently considered a clustering problem, and
there are a number of methods in the literature developed to solve this
Hakimi (1964), who developed the first model to evaluate the op-
timum locations for police stations in the communication network of a
highway system. Krarup and Pruzan (1983) studied an important fa-
mily of discrete, deterministic, single-criterion, NP-hard, and widely
applicable optimization problems known as the simple plant location
problem. Sridharan (1995) studied the capacitated plant location
problem considering each plant with a maximum capacity, and ex-
amined two innovative concepts: the Lagrangian heuristic and vari-
able splitting. In addition to the static and deterministic models
mentioned above, Owen and Daskin, (1998) considered the effects of
future event uncertainties including time-varying environmental fac-
tors, population shift, and market development trends, and reviewed
the literature offering significant improvements on solving the facility
location problem. Snyder, (2006) reviewed the stochastic and robust
facility location models existing in the literature and summarized a
rich variety of approaches and their applications in different fields
(see Fig. 1).

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: youmdyx@buaa.edu.cn (M. You), Xiaoyiyong@buaa.edu.cn (Y. Xiao), zhang_sy@buaa.edu.cn (S. Zhang), yangpei@buaa.edu.cn (P. Yang),
zhoush@buaa.edu.cn (S. Zhou).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2019.07.020
Received 25 April 2019; Received in revised form 7 July 2019; Accepted 8 July 2019
Available online 09 July 2019
0360-8352/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
M. You, et al.
Fig. 1. Framework of weighted k-means algorithm for WLP.
With further consideration of the practical factors and environ-
mental conditions, the latest models for WLP have become considerably
closer to a practical application. García et al. (2014) and Huang, Wang,
Rajan, and Rakesh (2015) considered the nature of stored goods, and
included the effects of time and price on demand. Further to the
quantitative factors, Demirel, Nihan, and Cengiz (2010) also considered
qualitative factors that could be inaccurate, incomplete, or vague, and
adopted a multi-criteria method for evaluating the solution result of the
WLP. Recently proposed models of the WLP in the literature, such as
Maharjana and Shinya (2017) and Shahabi, Tafreshian, Unnikrishnan,
and Boyles (2018), have considered more actual factors of develop-
ment, disaster safety, transportation accessibility, and demand change
to solve the problem with more realistic solutions.
The k-means-like algorithms are effective and frequently used
methods for warehouse or facility location problems. Gupta and
Tangwongsan (2008) proposed local search algorithms for metric in-
stances of facility location problems including the uncapacitated facility
location problem (UFLP), as well as uncapacitated versions of the k-
median, k-center, and k-means problems. Liao and Guo (2010) trans-
formed the Capacitated Facility Location Problem (such as warehouse
location problem) into a clustering model and developed a weighted k-
means clustering method. However, drawbacks inherent to the classical
WLP algorithm also exist in the weighted k-means clustering algorithm,
including uncontrollable error, results being influenced by the initial
solution, and not being able to guarantee an optimal solution. The latest
survey on the k-means algorithm and several expanded methods can be
found in Blömer, Lammersen, Schmidt, and Sohler (2016). In addition
to the weighted k-means, the fuzzy c-means is another popular algo-
rithm employed for the WLP; these use a fuzzy membership function to
assign one object to multiple clusters with different degrees of be-
longingness (Zalik, 2006; Küçükdeniz & Büyüksaatçi, 2008;
Küçükdeniz, Baray, Ecerkale, & Esnaf, 2012; Zhang, Kaku, & Xiao,
2012; Şakir, Küçükdeniz, & Tunçbilek, 2014).
However, the majority of the mathematical models for the WLP
existing in the literature are nonlinearly formulated and are solved by
using clustering algorithms (such as the weighted k-means), heuristic
optimization algorithms (such as the genetic algorithm (GA)), variable
neighborhood search (VNS), or Simulated Annealing (SA) (Xiao, Kaku,
Zhao, Zhang, 2011, 2012; Xiao and Konak, 2016, 2017; Lin & Wang,
2018; Adasme, 2018). Therefore, the obtained results are not guaran-
teed to be globally optimized and, according to our comparative ex-
periments, had potentially intolerable deviations from the optimal so-
lutions. The main reason leading to this phenomenon is related to the
use of weighted mean center as the cluster center, which can deviate
considerably from the optimal cluster center, especially when custo-
mers’ locations and demands are unevenly distributed. Lin and Wang
(2018) proposed a mixed-integer nonlinear model for the WLP and
developed a two-stage solution approach that uses a GA for the first
stage and a gradient method for the second stage. Adasme (2018)
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Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79
proposed a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for
the p-median problem and proposed a VNS-based meta-heuristic algo-
rithm as the solution approach. Similar works can be found in
Mladenovic, Brimberg, Hansen, and Perez (2007), Herda (2017),
Kocatepe, Ozguven, Horner, and Ozel (2017), and Adler, Njoya, and
Volta (2018). However, the p-median requires the cluster centers to be
selected from a set of candidate sites that are known beforehand. The
WLP involves determining the continuous location coordinates of the
warehouses/facilities in a region; the Euclidean distance metrics always
cause the mathematical models to be nonlinear and thereby only non-
optimal solutions can be obtained with heuristic processes.
In this study, we formulate the WLP as an MILP model, known as
WLP-MILP, with the Euclidean distance linearization method in-
troduced by Xie, Zhou, Xiao, Sadan, and Konak (2018). Compared to
the nonlinear models existing in the literature, the proposed WLP-MILP
model overcomes the previously mentioned existing drawbacks, and
can be optimally solved using a commercial MILP solver. Furthermore,
the linearization approximation method can guarantee the maximum
deviation between actual and approximated distances within a small
error range; hence, the solutions can be deemed as practically optimal.
For large-scale problems that cannot be solved to optimality by MILP
solvers, we develop a fix-and-optimize heuristic approach based on
dynamic iterative partial optimization to obtain near-optimal solutions
within a controllable CPU time. Computational experiments were
conducted to demonstrate the accuracy and computational efficiency of
the proposed approach. The results were compared to those obtained by
the conventional weighted k-means algorithm, which demonstrated
that the optimal/best solutions obtained by the proposed method are
considerably superior to those obtained by the traditional methods
(−14.0% improvement on average).
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we
introduced the WLP and its conventional solution approach, i.e., the
weighted k-means algorithm. In Section 3, an MILP model is presented
for the WLP, in addition to the MILP-based dynamic iterative partial
optimization (MILP-DIPO) heuristic algorithm. In Section 4, computa-
tional experiments are performed on benchmark datasets to test the
proposed model and heuristic algorithm, and compare the obtained
results with those of the conventional weighted k-means algorithm.
Finally, the conclusions are presented in Section 5.
2. Warehouse location problem
The WLP can be described as follows: A set N of customers are to be
served by a set K of warehouses. Each customer i, where i N , is as-
sociated with a demand ai and a distance dik to each k in K. The problem
is to determine the optimal locations for the warehouses (by coordinate
variables xk and yk) and the assignments of customer to warehouse (by
binary variable wik) with the objective of minimizing the total trans-
portation cost measured by the sum of the product of the customer’s
M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

demand and distance to the warehouse to which it belongs. A mathe- acceptable CPU time, we present a fix-and-optimize heuristic approach
matical formulation of the WLP can be described as follows (Liao & for obtaining a near-optimal solution. We hereby refer to the datasets
Guo, 2010): that can be optimally solved by an MILP solver as small-sized, and refer
Problem WLP: to those that cannot be solved optimality within an acceptable CPU
time (within 24 h) as large-sized.
Min. F (X , W ) = wik ·dik ·ai
i N k K (1)
3.1. Mixed-integer linear programming model
Subject to:

wik = 1 i N In this subsection, we model the WLP as an MILP. The parameters

k K (2) and decision variables used to describe the MILP model are summarized
as follows:
dik = (x i xk )2 + (yi yk )2 i N, k K (3) Parameters:

wik {0, 1}; xk 0; yk 0; i N, k K (4)

N set of customers, N = {1, 2, 3,…, n}
In the above formulations, N represents the set of customers, and ai i index of customers, i N
and (xi , yi ) represent the demand and coordinates of customer i, re- K set of warehouses/facilities, K = {1, 2, 3,…, m}
spectively. Terms (xk , yk ) are the coordinates of warehouse k, where k index of warehouses/facilities
(xk , yk ) X and k K . Variable wik indicates if customer i is served by (Xi, Yi) coordinates of customer i
Xmin, Xm- minimum and maximum coordinates of customers in x direction
warehouse k (wik = 1) or not (wik = 0). The objective function in Eq. (1) ax

is to minimize the total weighted distance of customers to their assigned Ymin, Ym- minimum and maximum coordinates of customers in y direction
warehouses. Constraint (2) requires that a customer can be assigned to ax

only one warehouse. Constraint (3) computes the Euclidean distances of ai amount of demand (or service) of customer i
β a given maximum error percentage allowed in linearization approxima-
customers to their assigned warehouse. Constraint (4) defines the value
tion of Euclidean distance
domain of the decision variables. θ a constant angel calculated by = arccos(1 + 4 + 2 2) that is used to
The traditional steps of the weighted k-means algorithm for the WLP determine the number of linear constraints for Euclidean distance
are described as follows (Chen, Yin, Tu, & Zhang, 2009): linearization
However, the above algorithm has two drawbacks: (1) it is a greedy q
an integer number calculated by q = , indicating the number of
2
process that is quite likely to trap into a local optima, and (2) the final linear constraints for Euclidean distance linearization, where · is the
results are sensitive to the initial warehouse locations. We provide an operator to get the upper integer
example in Fig. 2 to demonstrate how the weighted k-means algorithm M large number
cannot identify the optimal solution, where a warehouse location must
Decision variables:
be determined for 4 customers represented by circular points “1”, “2”,
“3”, and “4” with coordinates (0, 1), (0, 0), (0, −1), and (4, 0), re-
spectively. The demand of customers is “1”. The algorithm determines uik binary decision variables denoting whether customer i is serviced by
the weighted mean coordinates of the four customers at point A (1, 0), warehouse k
with the objective function value of 1 + 3 + 2 2 6.28. However, we (xk, yk) non-negative continuous variables denoting coordinates of warehouse k
dikx non-negative continuous variable denoting distance between customer i
can easily find a reduced objective value of 6 if the warehouse location
and warehouse k in x-axis direction
is set at another point B (0, 0). Further, to demonstrate the effect of y y non-negative continuous variable denoting distance between customer i
dik dik
different demands on the warehouse location optimization, we assume and warehouse k in y-axis direction
another two points, P (1, 0) and Q (4, 0), that have demands of “1” and dik dik non-negative continuous variable denoting Euclidean distance between
“3”, respectively. Thus, according to the weighted k-means algorithm, customer i and warehouse k

the weighted center location for them should be (3.25, 0), with a cost of The objective function is to minimize the total logistics volume mea-
4.5. However, one can easily verify that the cost can be reduced to three sured as the sum of the distance from each customer to its corre-
(reduced by −50%) if point Q (4, 0) is used as the center location. sponding warehouse center weighted by the demand amount. Thus, the
WLP can be formulated as an MILP model as follows:
3. Mathematical programming model and heuristic approach Problem WLP-MILP:
m n
In this section, we present the linear model for the WLP with
Min. Total _Log = dik ai
mathematical programming techniques, which is directly solvable using k=1 i=1 (5)
a commercial MILP solver (such as CPLEX or Lingo) for small-sized
datasets. For large datasets that cannot be directly solved within an Subject to:
m
uik = 1 i N
k= 1 (6)

dikx Xi xk M (1 uik ) i N, k K (7)

dikx xk Xi M (1 uik ) i N, k K (8)

diky Yi yk M (1 uik ) i N, k K (9)

diky yk Yi M (1 uik ) i N, k K (10)

dik dikx cos(p ) + diky sin(p ) i N, k K , p = 0, 1, 2, ...,q 1

Fig. 2. Simple example of WLP. (11)

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M. You, et al.
Table 1
Parameters θ and q with respect to different β values.
β −5.00% −1.00% −0.50% −0.1% −0.05%
θ 0.6351 0.2831 0.2001 0.0895 0.0632
q 3 6 8 18 25
uik {0, 1}; xk 0; yk 0;
i N, k K suggests that a customer waiting for a longer time (not selected) should
dikx 0; diky 0; dik 0 (12)
In the above formulations, Constraint (6) guarantees that each
customer i is assigned to one warehouse. Constraints (7) and (8) require
that variable dikx have a value that is no less than the distance from
customer i to warehouse k in the x-axis direction. Similarly, Constraints
(9) and (10) require that variable diky have a value that is no less than
the distance from customer i to warehouse k in the y-axis direction.
Constraint (11) uses the inequalities developed in Xie et al. (2018) to
approximate the Euclidean distance dik = (dikx ) 2 + (diky ) 2 within a
maximum allowed error rate β. The relation of parameters θ, q, and β is
displayed in Table 1. In the experimental section, we used β = −0.1%
as our pilot; experiments indicated that setting β = −0.1% guaranteed
the most actual requirements for solution accuracy and did not sig-
nificantly increase the computational burden. Constraint (12) defines
the value domains of all the variables.
The following Constraint (13) is used to break the clustering sym-
metry of the solution space, which reduces the computational time by
approximately 50% according to our experimental comparison. This is
because solutions with the same locations of cluster centers can be
deemed as the same, though the clusters could be numbered differently.
xk 1 xk
k K, k > 1
or yk 1 yk
3.2. Fix-and-optimize solution approach
The fix-and-optimize heuristic is a concrete adaptation of the dy-
namic iterative partial optimization strategy to solve the WLP-MILP
model (Xiao, Kaku, et al., 2011, Xiao, Zhang, Kaku, 2011, Xiao et al.,
2014; Xiao and Konak, 2016, 2017). Its basic principle is described as
follows: For a large-sized complex problem with multiple decision
variables that cannot be solved optimally within an acceptable CPU
time, a partial optimization can be applied on only a smaller set of the
selected decision variables while fixing a majority of the other variables
with given values. Thus, the selected decision variables can be effi-
ciently optimized in minimal CPU time. This is then repeated, selecting
a different smaller set of the decision variables to fulfill the partial
optimization iteratively, until no further improvement can be made to
the objective function after a given number of continuous attempts.
In WLP-MILP, the variable uik is an independent decision variable
that determines the membership of customers to warehouses. Other
variables, including xk , yk , dikx , diky , and dik , are dependent variables on
uik. Thus, the fix-and-optimize heuristic was designed to conduct dy-
namic iterative partial optimizations on variable uik using an MILP
solver (this was named MILP-DIPO). The MILP-DIPO algorithm starts
from a random initialization of the variable uik and calculates the ob-
jective function using an MILP solver (e.g., the CPLEX). Then, it re-
peatedly selects a set of uik to fulfill the partial optimization while fixing
the remaining part of uik with their current values until the objective
function cannot be further improved after a given number of attempts
or a time limit. The size of the variables to be selected in the next at-
tempt of partial optimization is dynamically adjusted according to the
CPU time used in the last attempt. The main steps of the MILP-DIPO
algorithm for WLP are outlined in Fig. 3 as follows:
To improve the efficiency and accuracy of the algorithm, the
priority policies introduced in Xiao, Zuo, Kaku, Zhou, and Pan (2019)
Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79
are applied in Step 3(B) to guide the selection of the p percentage of uik.
The first is the weighted Distance Priority Policy (WDPP), which assumes
−0.01% that customers with greater weighted distances to their assigned
warehouse centers should have higher probabilities to be selected. The
0.0283 underlying philosophy is that because these customers are farther from
56
their warehouse centers, they contribute more to the objective function
and are more likely to shift their memberships to reduce the cost
function. The second policy is called the Time Priority Policy (TPP). This
have a higher probability to be selected next time. Under TPP, each
customer is associated with a time recorder to record how many times it
has been selected and the customers with lower recorded times should
have higher probabilities to be selected. Further, we also use the
random selection policy (RSP) to guide the iterative partial optimiza-
tion. The effect of mixed use of these three policies was verified in our
computational experiments.
In the above MILP-DIPO algorithm, the CPU time was primarily
consumed by Step 3(D), where the MILP solver is called to implement a
partial optimization on the WLP-MILP model. For a given parameter p,
its computational time can be deemed as a constant represented by
T(p). We adopted a dynamic strategy to automatically adjust parameter
p in Steps 3(F) and 3(G), where parameter p increases by 1% if the used
CPU time is less than a given minimum threshold tmin (e.g., 1 s), or will
decrease by 1% if the CPU time used is greater than a given maximum
threshold tmax (e.g., 10 s). The algorithm’s computational complexity
can be judged by how many times the MILP solver is called, which is
determined linearly by the parameter Cmax. Thus, we can largely esti-
mate the complexity of the algorithm as O (n × m × Cmax × T(p)),
where n and m correspond to the numbers of customers and warehouses
and T(p) represents the CPU time used by the MILP solver under
parameter p. The conventional weighted k-means algorithm is known
(13) for its high computational efficiency and can be estimated with a
polynomial complexity of O (k × n), where k is the number of clusters
and n is the number of customers.
4. Computational experiments
The computational experiments were performed on a Linux PC
server with two 2.30 GHz Intel Xeon (R) CPUs and 128 GB RAM. The
MILP solver AMPL/CPLEX (version 12.6.0.1) was used to solve the
tested instances. The experiment consisted of two parts. The first part
was on six synthesized small datasets to test the optimality effect of the
proposed WLP-MILP model compared to the traditional weighted k-
means algorithm. The second part was to test the performance of the
proposed MILP-DIPO algorithm on solving benchmark instances ex-
isting in the literature. All the test datasets and optimal solutions are
available on the Mendeley Data Repository (Xiao, 2019) at link https://
data.mendeley.com/datasets/46kw4zxxnw/draft?a=76812ccd-543a-
49eb-8f44-fc12d74b3226.
4.1. Experiments on testing optimality effect
First, we randomly synthesized 6 small-sized instances (named “R1”
to “R6”) with customer numbers from 8 to 40, and cluster numbers
from 2 to 3 to illustrate the difference between the optimal solutions by
the WLP-MILP model and the heuristic solutions by the weighted k-
means algorithm. The customer locations were scattered randomly in a
100 × 100 plane region and their demands were generated randomly in
the range [1, 100]. We first applied the WLP-MILP model to obtain their
optimal solutions using the CPLEX solver. We then used the weighted k-
means algorithm to solve them repeatedly ten times and obtained ten
heuristic solutions. The results are displayed and compared in Table 2,
where column k indicates the number of clusters, column n indicates
the number of customers, column Obj. indicates the obtained objective
values by the WLP-MILP model and by the weighted k-means method.
The terms Min. and AVG. represent, respectively, the minimum and
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M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

Fig. 3. Main framework of MILP-DIPO algorithm.

average values obtained by the ten runs.
It can be observed that the optimal solutions by the WLP-MILP
model are on average −14.0% less than the heuristic solutions by the
weighted k-means (or the later departs from the former by 16.8% on
average), and the maximum improvement was greater than −20% for
instances R1 and R2. The average improvement by the new approach
was −8.1% for the tested instances, even compared to the best solu-
tions found by the weighted k-means algorithm. In Figs. 4–9, we
compare the optimal solutions by the WLP-MILP model and the best
solution delivered by the weighted k-means algorithm, respectively,
where hollow “squares” represent customers, filled “circles” represent
warehouses (i.e., cluster centers), and customers in the same cluster are
plotted in the same color and outlined in dotted ellipses. It can be ob-
served that the solutions obtained by the different methods have con-
siderably different clustering centers. This means that noticeably dif-
ferent locations have been suggested according to the two different
methods, even for the same problem instance, with minimum cost rate
deviations ranging from −4.3% to −10.6%. As indicated in Fig. 4, for
instance R1, even though the customers are clustered identically by
both methods, the warehouse locations are considerably different, re-
sulting in a cost deviation of −9.8%. Other instances from R2 to R6
have not only different costs, but also different clustered layouts under
the two methods.
Furthermore, we solved these six instances again using the
weighted k-means algorithm starting from the optimal centers de-
termined by the WLP-MILP model. That is, we set the optimal centers
as the initial seeds to execute the weighted k-means algorithm gain
and thereby validate the optimality of this traditional algorithm. We
received the resulting costs 410.9, 8649.0, 8126.8, 32293.3, 35052.5,
and 42280.4 for instances R1 to R6, respectively. These results con-
tinue to remain greater than the optimal values by 10.9%, 4.8%, 2.6%,
1.2%, 2.1%, and 2.8%, respectively. Thus, this comparison suggests
that the traditional weighted k-means algorithm cannot determine the
optimal solutions, regardless of the quality of the initialization it is
started from.

Table 2
Result comparison on synthesized small-sized datasets.
WLP-MILP model 10 runs of weighted k-means Improvements

Ins. k n Obj. T. (s) 1 AVG obj. Min. obj. T. (s) Dev. Min. % AVG %

R1 2 5 370.6 <1 465.9 410.9 <1 −40.3 −9.8% −20.5%

R2 2 8 8253.8 <1 10702.5 9230.7 <1 −976.9 −10.6% –22.9%
R3 2 10 7923.0 <1 8604.3 8707.2 <1 −681.3 −7.9% −9.0%
R4 3 30 31919.5 145 36969.6 35340.7 <1 −3421.2 −9.7% −13.7%
R5 3 35 34344.7 331 37927.1 36630.8 <1 −2286.1 −6.2% −9.4%
R6 3 40 41121.6 1319 44988.7 42985.1 <1 −1863.5 −4.3% −8.6%
AVG −8.1% −14.0%

Note: bold face indicates optimal values.

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M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

Fig. 4. Clustering results of R1 by different approaches (n = 5, k = 2).

Fig. 5. Clustering results of R2 by different approaches (n = 8, k = 2).

Fig. 6. Clustering results of R3 by different approaches (n = 10, k = 2).

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M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

Fig. 7. Clustering results of R4 by different approaches (n = 30, k = 3).

Fig. 8. Clustering results of R5 by different approaches (n = 35, k = 3).

Fig. 9. Clustering results of R6 by different approaches (n = 40, k = 3).

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M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

Table 3
Computational results on benchmark datasets.
Type k n 10 runs of MILP-DIPO 10 runs of weighted k-means Improvement

Min. obj. AVG obj. T. (s) Min. obj. AVG obj. T. (s) Min. AVG

Flame 2 240 37606.4 37606.4 337 38469.4 38472.1 <1 −2.2% −2.3%
Jain 2 373 126360.8 126377.5 200 128688.8 128768.8 <1 −1.8% −1.9%
Pathbased 3 300 69603.3 69603.3 423 70022.0 70026.6 <1 −0.6% −0.6%
Spiral 3 312 91710.5 91,716 625 92043.9 92098.3 <1 −0.4% −0.4%
S2 3 334 148208.4 156964.8 475 150931.5 168847.2 <1 −1.8% −7.0%
S1 5 334 108355.3 131303.3 589 115537.2 133704.1 <1 −6.2% −1.8%
Compound 6 399 53980.1 59493.5 1075 54599.8 64651.5 <1 −1.1% −8.0%
Aggregation 7 394 66578.3 69279.8 1114.1 66713.6 68477.2 <1 −0.2% 1.2%
AVG 604 −1.8% −2.6%

Fig. 10. Trends of incumbent solution by MILP-DIPO algorithm.

4.2. Experiments on testing the MILP-DIPO algorithm against the solving time. As can be observed in these figures, the in-
cumbent solution decreased rapidly at the beginning and improved
In this subsection, we tested the MILP-DIPO algorithm proposed in gradually as the partial optimization process continued. The result was
Section 3.2 using benchmark datasets existing in the literature. The test delivered after expending the given time length without improvement.
datasets were from the UEF repository (http://cs.uef.fi/sipu/datasets/) In Fig. 11, we display the operator success rates (OSR) of the three
with customer numbers ranging from 240 to 399. We refer to these as operators used in the iterative partial optimization: WDPP, Frequency
“Flame”, “Jain”, “Pathbased”, “Spiral”, “S2”, “S1”, “Compound”, and Priority Policy (FPP), and RSP. The OSR is defined as the ratio of the
“Aggregation”. The customers’ demands were randomly generated be- time of using the operator to the time of improvement on the incumbent
tween 1 and 100. We used the MILP-DIPO algorithm described in Fig. 3 solution (Xiao et al., 2016). An operator with a higher OSR indicates
to solve the datasets with parameter settings p = 5%, Cmax = 50, greater efficiency in optimizing the problem. It indicates that WDPP
tmin = 5, and tmax = 5, and compared the obtained results to those and FPP have higher rates than RSP, contributing more time of im-
obtained by the weighted k-means algorithm. We repeated both algo- provement to the incumbent solution. Note that we used these three
rithms ten times, and display their average and best solutions in operators with equal probabilities in the MILP-DIPO algorithm. The
Table 3. competitive strategy of Dellaert and Jeunet (2000), where the operator
It can be observed that in terms of the best solutions obtained, the with the higher OSR is given a higher probability of use, could be
MILP-DIPO heuristic outperformed the weighted k-means for all tested
datasets, with improvements ranging from −0.2% to −6.2% and an
average improvement of −1.8%. In terms of the average improvement,
except the instance “Aggregation”, the instances demonstrated im-
provements ranging from −0.4 to −8.0% with an average improve-
ment of −2.6%. It is notable that the overall improvement was not as
significant as that of the small-sized datasets in Table 2. This is likely
because of two reasons: (1) the solutions by MILP-DIPO are not guar-
anteed to be optimal and can possibly be further optimized and (2) the
uneven distributions of the customers and demands were balanced to an
extent by introducing more customers in a random manner, which
could have neutralized the solution differences.
In Fig. 10, we select two instances (Compound and Aggregation) to
demonstrate the detailed performance of the MILP-DIPO algorithm,
where the convergence progress of the incumbent solutions is plotted Fig. 11. Comparison of success rates of different operators.

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M. You, et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 136 (2019) 70–79

Fig. 12. Initialization of MILP-DIPO* algorithm.

Table 4
Computational results with improved initialization.
Type k n 10 runs of MILP-DIPO* 10 runs of weighted k-means Improvement

Min. obj. AVG obj. T. (s) Min. obj. AVG obj. T. (s) Min. AVG

Flame 2 240 37606.4 37607.1 272 38469.4 38472.1 <1 −2.2% −2.2%
Jain 2 373 126360.8 126360.8 244 128688.8 128768.8 <1 −1.8% −1.9%
Pathbased 3 300 69603.3 70800.4 340 70022.0 70026.6 <1 −0.6% 1.1%
Spiral 3 312 91686.5 92143.5 478 92043.9 92098.3 <1 −0.4% 0.0%
S2 3 334 148208.4 152860.3 294 150931.5 168847.2 <1 −1.8% −9.5%
S1 5 334 108355.3 134072.3 320 115537.2 133704.1 <1 −6.2% 0.3%
Compound 6 399 53980.1 59242.5 383 54599.8 64651.5 <1 −1.1% −8.4%
Aggregation 7 394 66589.8 70215.9 834 66713.6 68477.2 <1 −0.2% 2.5%
AVG 395 −1.8% −2.2%

helpful in accelerating and improving the optimizing process.
Next, we re-executed the MILP-DIPO algorithm with an improved
initialization. That is, before starting the iterative partial optimization
on variable uik, we implemented the partial optimization on variables
(xk, yk) and uik alternatively as a whole. The initialization is depicted in
Fig. 12 and the computational results are presented in Table 4, where
the MILP-DIPO algorithm with the new initialization method is denoted
as MILP-DIPO*. Compared to the performances by MILP-DIPO in
Table 3, MILP-DIPO* provided a similar level of solution quality in
terms of both the minimum and average improvements upon the results
of the weighted k-means algorithm. However, the MILP-DIPO* de-
monstrated greater efficiency, successfully reducing the average com-
putational time by 34%.
perspective of real-life applications. However, the new algorithm has
efficient drawbacks for large-sized problems and it does not guarantee
solution optimality in such situations. Future works are planned in two
directions: (1) to develop more efficient and effective heuristics for
solving large-sized problem instances, and (2) to consider a capacitated
WLP with limited warehouses and stochastic customer demands.
Acknowledgments
This study was partly funded by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 71871003 and 71571004, and
the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant
number YWF-19-BJ-J-330).

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