An Algorithm and Computational Procedure for Locating Economic Facilities

The problem of locating economic facilities in such a manner as to minimize the cost of moving inputs from source points to the facilities and outputs from the facilities to subsequent destination points has had considerable attention in recent times. A wide and diverse variety of approaches which give reasonable but not necessarily optimal solutions to such problems has been suggested. This paper suggests a different approach to this familiar problem. For a single facility location problem, an algorithm is presented which produces optimal locations. For the case of locating several new facilities a computer search process is instituted which produces close to optimal locations.