Abstarct: In recent years, covering location studies are considered as one of the key elements for success and survival of industrial and service centers. Therefore, objectives and solution techniques recognition of covering location problems is very important. In this thesis, first we present an introduction to location problems and covering concept and present a history of covering location problems. Then we express the set covering location problem and the maximum covering location problem and present a number of heuristic methods for solving them. After a discussion on maximum covering location problem, we introduce the maximum expected covering location model. As the third covering problem, we explain the minimum covering location problem with distance constraints (MCLPDC) and present several formulations for it. Then we compare the running time of these formulations with each other. Finally, we introduce the tabu search heurist method and compare the performance of it for solving MCLPDC with other heuristic methods that are proposed for solving this problem.