A Branch-Price-and-Cut Procedure for the Discrete Ordered Median Problem

The discrete ordered median problem (DOMP) is formulated as a set-partitioning problem using an exponential number of variables. Each variable corresponds to a set of demand points allocated to the same facility with the information of the sorting position of their corresponding costs. We develop a column generation approach to solve the continuous relaxation of this model. Then we apply a branch-price-and-cut algorithm to solve small- to large-sized instances of DOMP in competitive computational time.