Facilities Location and Allocation

The whole question of the optimal location of a facility, whether a manufacturing plant or any other operation, is complex.

Considerable amounts of time and money can be saved - or lost - depending on whether the right or wrong decision is made.

Accordingly the subject is the concern of numbers of people in business or administration, and is taught as a course or part of a course in departments of industrial, manufacturing and civil engineering, and in schools of business in management science and quantitative methods departments.

Although the subject can be very mathematical, this textbook is written for those students or other readers who do not necessarily have this background or temperament and yet may need to handle the subject carefully and effectively.

This book emphasizes the main practical problem-solving approaches and their applications, and the key concepts and solution procedures are set out, not on the mathematical proofs.

However the student or professional using the book will need to have completed a first course in Operations Research.