In this example we will learn how to use GFA with roads experiment to find the best locations for distribution centers in the cities with the defined population and considering transportation by roads.

We will consider a supply chain in Europe comprising:

• Three suppliers in Bergen, Goteborg and Helsinki
• 150 customers located in the largest cities of: Norway, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden

The supply chain deals with two types of aggregated products: chilled fish and frozen fish.

The average demand per capita per year:

• 4 kg of frozen fish
• 16 kg of chilled fish

We will suppose that:

• The supply chain covers 15% of the total demand of the cities
• The distribution centers are located in the cities with the minimum population of 50,000 people
• The transportation cost from suppliers to distribution centers is twice less than cost of transportation from distribution centers to customers

We do not deal with the absolute value of the transportation cost, but the ratio of transportation costs applied to two echelons is important because it affects the optimal locations of distribution centers.

Find the best locations for 5 distribution centers considering movement on roads and sea routes as well as known locations of suppliers and customers.

Let us run the GFA with roads experiment.

The result of the experiment contains distribution centers located in the following cities: Helsinki, Hamburg, Poznan, Goteborg, and Bergen.

The data on product flows, distance coverage by demand and demand coverage by distance is shown in the corresponding tables.

• Product Flows — shows detailed statistics on the flows of the supply chain within the specified period of time.
• New Site Locations — Shows information on all the new sites created by the experiment.
• Distance Coverage by Demand — shows detailed statistics on the distance to cover to satisfy a certain percentage of the demand.
• Demand Coverage by Distance (and total demand) — shows detailed statistics on the demand to satisfy within a certain distance per site created by the GFA experiment.

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