Here is your second homework assignment. Read the instruction carefully,

Suzuki Auto Batteries, a manufacturer of batteries for automobiles, sells its products in the auto aftermarket and distributes them nationwide. The company divides the US market into regions and each region has one distribution center. The company sends its batteries by trucks from distribution centers to customers. The company is concerned about the most economical location for a distribution center to serve its southeastern region. Currently, the Atlanta warehouse serves this region. The companymanagement, however, believes that the Atlanta location is not the most economical location. Customer location and shipping data for the company’s southeastern region is provided in the spreadsheet template. Your task is to help the company management determine the new location of southeastern distribution center by answering the following questions. Use the center-of-gravity solution as initial solution for all optimization runs, unless otherwise specified.

Question 1

Use the center-of-gravity model to determine the best (heuristically best) location of the southeastern distribution center for the company. Make sure to include both transportation rate and shipment tons as weights.

Question 2

Find the optimal solution (DC location) that minimizes transportation cost by using Analytic Solver Platform. Use the solution for Q1 as initial solution.

Question 3

The top management does not want to locate the distribution center within 200 grid-unit radius from City of Atlanta because of high cost of land (grid coordinate of City of Atlanta is (1300, 650)). Solve question 2 again by imposing this constraint. Use the grid coordinate (1600, 400) as the starting value (initial value) when using solver.

Question 4

(Ignore question 3) Solve the problem by using the Min-Max method. Here, you want to minimize the maximum distance to any customer. Use the solution for question 2 as initial solution.