Single warehouse problem: Locating warehouse at center of mass (using R)

In a previous post I demonstrated how one can assign customers to the nearest warehouse using a well-known clustering algorithm. In this post I will demonstrate how a single warehouse location problem can be approached by applying center of mass calculation in R. The idea is to locate the warehouse in right in the average center of demand, taking into account spatial distribution of customer demand.

Below, I define the center of mass function. It takes into account x and y coordinates. I.e. we simplify the problem by neglecting the vertical z-axis of our spatial location problem. w stands for the weights of the respective coordinates. This could e.g. be the demand by location.

center_of_mass <- function(x,y,w){
  c(crossprod(x,w)/sum(w),crossprod(y,w)/sum(w))
}

Next, I create a dataframe representing customer demand. I apply latitude and longitude coordinates. Latitude value range is from -90 to +90. Longitude value range is from -180 to +180. I create 40 customers with random location and demand, somewhere within the coordinate-system.

customer_df <- as.data.frame(matrix(nrow=40,ncol=3))
colnames(customer_df) <- c("lat","long","demand")

customer_df$lat <- runif(n=40,min=-90,max=90)
customer_df$long <- runif(n=40,min=-180,max=180)
customer_df$demand <- sample(x=1:100,size=40,replace=TRUE)

Below I print the header of that dataframe:

head(customer_df)

##         lat      long demand
## 1 -46.40781  43.13533      4
## 2 -29.06806  98.97764     72
## 3 -75.84997 127.47619     44
## 4 -54.37377  55.16857     66
## 5  71.67371 178.98597     21
## 6 -34.03587 -42.88747    100

Using that dataset I can calculate the center of mass:

center_of_mass(customer_df$lat,customer_df$long,customer_df$demand)

## [1] -2.80068 12.49750

To assess this result, I plot the customer demand using ggplot2:

library(ggplot2)
joint_df <- rbind(customer_df,c(center_of_mass(customer_df$lat,customer_df$long,customer_df$demand),50))
joint_df$type <- c(rep(x="customer",times=40),"warehouse")
ggplot(data=joint_df) + geom_point(mapping=aes(x=lat,y=long,size=demand,color=type))

The center of mass method can be well combined with heatmap visualisation of spatial customer demand distribution. For this, you can read my blog post on how to create heatmaps in R, using the Leaflet package: Leaflet heatmaps in R

I also use other packages to visualize spatial distribution of customer demand, including deckgl: Using deckgl in R for spatial data visualisation