Warehouse Optimization

shg, Thank you for your response. I wish it was homework, more a mini project that will greatly effect my business savings. I am lucky in the sense I would contract a warehouse so zoning, land prices, construction costs, and taxes are variables I wont have to mess with, however you hit the nail on the head as far as what I am trying to do. Any suggestions?

I looked at the link you sent me, I dont have access to to IEEE.

I think you can do well without taking everything into account at once... To get started, if I were you, I would define say 5 regions for your warehouses, with approximately equal areas. Then, within each area I would minimize the average distance to the customers (euclidian norm as mentioned above). That's a start - then you may start to think about adding details later, such as road standards, taxes and so on...

It is always better ot start with the simple assumptions and arrive at a useful solution than to make everything super-realistic but close to impossible to solve. The latter is the academic approach (as I learned from doing PhD research....)

That is a great point, I guess my problem is implenting the best method in which to produce such data. Any suggestions?