An approach for finding the optimal location of public logistic centres in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The text deals with an approach for finding the optimal location of public logistic centres in the Czech Republic. This particular problem can be characterized as follows: all the new facilities (logistic centres) are of the same type and all the existing facilities (customers) are of the same type, so it does not matter which logistic centre serves which customer. This class of problems is called multifacility location-allocation problems: the location and allocation problems are solved simultaneously. The problem was solved as planar location problem with Euclidean distance. In the case when the capacities of logistic centres are unlimited, only two types of data are sufficient for the solution: coordinates of existing facilities (customers) and amount of their demand. The amount of demand was considered as the flow of goods among 14 administrative regions (road transport of goods, railway transport of goods and inland water transportation of goods). The chosen structure of territory is quite rough but more accurate data were not available. There were calculated several variants; as the most suitable (when considering density of existing of planned logistic centres in Germany or Slovakia) was evaluated the variant with 5 logistic centres.