A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Commercial Territory Design

Abstract: A new heuristic procedure for a commercial territory design problem is introduced in this work. The proposed procedure, based on the divide-and-conquer paradigm, consists basically of a successive dichotomy process of a given large instance of the problem. During this process, a series of integer quadratic subproblems is solved. Computational results showed that the proposed heuristic is an attractive technique for obtaining locally optimal solutions for large instances which are intractable by using exact optimization methods.