Distribution center demo

Where should a company put its warehouses to stay close to the most customers? Pick how many to open and what matters, and the optimizer searches all 1,000 of the world's largest cities for the best sites. It runs in your browser, usually in about a second.

Distribution centers 5 Let running costs decide how many

Measure distance

Road and sea follows coastlines, canals and road detours, and ships between continents.

Weight demand by

Purchasing power multiplies population by GDP per person.

Avoid weak logistics Off

Penalizes sites in countries with a low World Bank logistics score.

Running cost per center Off

At US prices, a center costs as much as moving every customer this much farther. Cheaper countries cost less.

Capacity per center No limit

The largest share of all demand one center can serve.

Lock in a city

Force a site you already own; the optimizer places the rest around it.

Average distance

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by road and sea

Far from a center

–

of demand is over 3,000 km away

Solved in

–

Chosen sites and the cities they serve

Distribution center
City (size = demand)

Loading cities…

Drag to spin the globe. Lines show which center serves each city, not the route.

Distribution centers and the share of demand each serves
Center	Country	Share of demand

How it works

The problem: choose k cities as centers so that the demand-weighted distance from every city to its nearest center is as small as possible (the "p-median" problem).
The method: start by adding centers one at a time, each in the spot that helps most. Then keep trying to move any center to any other city, applying the best move, until no move helps. With capacity limits, the biggest cities pick first and each takes the nearest center with room.
Distances: by road on the same landmass (straight line times a road detour factor for each country), otherwise by road to the coast, by sea along real shipping lanes through Suez and Panama, and by road again.
Try: switch between road and sea and straight-line distance to see how much the oceans matter, set a running cost and let it pick how many centers to open, or cap each center at 25% of demand and watch Asia split.

Data: the 1,000 largest cities in the dataset, across 129 countries. GDP per person, logistics scores and price levels come from the World Bank; a handful of countries it doesn't cover use the median of their income group. Read the case study or the code.