Properties and solution methods for large location-allocation problems

Location-allocation with l$ _p$ distances is studied. It is shown that this structure can be expressed as a concave minimization programming problem. Since concave minimization algorithms are not yet well developed, five solution methods are developed which utilize the special properties of the location-allocation problem. Using the rectilinear distance measure, two of these algorithms achieved optimal solutions in all 102 test problems for which solutions were known. The algorithms can be applied to much larger problems than any existing exact methods.