Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
FACILITY LOCATION
A N D ALLOCATION
DILEEP R. SULE
Louisiana Tech University
Ruston, Louisiana
Headquarters
Marcel Dekker, Inc.
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
tel: 212-696-9000; fax: 212-685-4540
The publisher offers discounts on this book when ordered in bulk quantities. For more
information, write to Special Sales=Professional Marketing at the headquarters address
above.
Neither this book nor any part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, micro®lming, and recording, or
by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Facility location has long been a subject of interest among industrial engineers,
transportation engineers, management scientists, operations researchers, and
logistics personnel. Major contributors to the ®eld have come from many sources,
but perhaps the largest single source has been well-trained mathematicians. As
such, most of the facility location research published in journals and books has
been mathematical in nature. Although the theorems and proofs that go along
with this research are very important for analyzing the subject matter, the
associated derivations and mathematical rigor can be intimidating to practicing
engineers and business executives. And the same is true with most undergraduate
and ®rst-year graduate students, who may not be so mathematically inclined. Yet
facility location is an important subject with numerous practical applications, and
a happy medium must thus be found between theory and practice. Procedures that
can be easily understood have a higher probability of being used in real life.
This book outlines such procedures for various location and allocation
objectives. To facilitate understanding of concepts, each procedure is illustrated
by a problem and its solution. However, this is not a cookbook. There are
mathematical and logical foundations for the methods; these become apparent as
one follows the necessary steps of the procedures. The idea is to take out the
needless complexity and convey the solution procedure through simple steps. It is
helpful, but not necessary, for the reader to have had one course in operations
research. Many models are formulated as linear programming (LP) models to
illustrate the mathematical structure, but are solved by simpler, alternative
methods. For those with access to a computer program to solve LP problems,
the formulations may be used to verify the results obtained by these alternative
methods. Operations research techniques using the branch-and-bound algorithm,
Dileep R. Sule
Preface