A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Commercial Territory Design

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