Special Topics in GIS Lab 6

This week in class we focused on Location-Allocation analysis. It involved determining the best solution based on selected criteria for matching locations with central hubs. A good example is many customers in different locations around the U.S. needing service from package handlers like UPS that has central hubs in different areas. The analysis would provide a solution to which customers should be serviced by which hubs.

This week we focused on a solution that matched customers to a distribution center. After the analysis was run we compared the solution to an overlay of the market areas. Some of the customers were being serviced by distribution centers that were not responsible for their market area. To fix the outliers we simply needed to re-designate some of the market areas. The image below shows the new market areas. It only differs slightly from the original market areas due to the small number of outliers. It is interesting to see the simple analysis that we performed this week. It has so many possible applications and could save companies a lot of money by increasing efficiency.