International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Management

  In this paper, multi-objective set covering problems (MOSCP) as one of the location-allocation models are being considered. Here, the objective is to minimize the cost of locating facilities and at the same time to maximize demand satisfaction in a defined structure so that each customer or zone is being covered by at least one facility. Since the problem falls into NP-hard category from the complexity point of view, it cannot be solved in a reasonable computational time period by an exact algorithm. For this reason, a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm is proposed to solve MOSCP. The algorithm is a meta-heuristic approach coupled with a neighborhood search technique.