Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means and Fortified Weiszfeld Hybrid Method for Uncapacitated Multi-Facility Location Problems

Abstract

In this article, a hybrid method is proposed to solve the uncapacitated planar multi-facility location problems. The new hybrid method consists of a combination of the Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means (RWFCM) algorithm proposed by Esnaf and Küçükdeniz (2013) and the Fortified Weiszfeld algorithm developed by Drezner (2015). The cluster centers and the cluster assignments of the RWFCM are fed into the Fortified Weiszfeld Algorithm separately for each cluster and facility-customer allocations are determined. The proposed approach is benchmarked on sample datasets from the facility location literature. Results of the proposed hybrid method show that the newly proposed sequentially-run method achieves better results when compared against the benchmark methods. This paper is a pioneer study of the hybrid use of Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means and Fortified Weiszfeld algorithms.