Continuous location of an assembly station

Demand existing at client points in the plane for several products should be met. Products have to be assembled from different components obtainable at given prices at various sources with known production capacities. The optimal design of the resulting supply chain must be determined, including the location of a central assembly station in the plane, so as to minimize the total operational cost comprising buying and transport of components as well as transport of final products. This problem leads to a difficult nonlinear and non‐convex optimization problem for which a locally convergent algorithm is proposed. Some computational results are presented.