The Uncapacitated Plant Cycle Problem seeks to select a
subset of potential locations in which to open plants dedicated to provide
service to customers scattered abroad upon the field. The locations
are known and each plant can serve an unlimited number of customers
through a vehicle route. The objective of this problem is to (i) determine
the number of plants to open, (ii) select the subset of locations in which
to open the plants, (iii) assign a non-empty subset of customers to each
plant, and (iv) determine a vehicle route dedicated to serve the subset
of customers assigned to each plant. With the goal of solving this problem
from an approximate point of view, a Greedy Randomized Adaptive
Search Procedure is proposed in this paper. The computational experiments
disclose the suitable performance of this algorithmic approach,
which allows to reach high-quality solutions in reasonable computational
times.
