The location of factories and warehouses has always been considered an important part of many disciplines: geography, regional science, transport studies, operations management, industrial economics and, more recently, logistics. Logistics texts usually treat this as a transhipment problem or transportation problem where there are fixed locations of supplies and customers and it is desired to optimally locate a facility to minimise some combination of production and transport costs between the origins and destinations. More recently interest in location studies have been re-awakened with the attention of business executives on supply chains. This paper uses a more general heuristic framework of simulated annealing to solve a generalised location supply chain model where it is easy to vary supply, demand and intermediate locations. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E211903.
Samenvatting