In this lesson, you will solve a logistics problem. A company has 10 stores. Each store must be supplied by one supplier warehouse. The company has five possible locations where it has property and can build a supplier warehouse: Bonn, Bordeaux, London, Paris, and Rome. The warehouse locations have different capacities. A warehouse built in Bonn or Paris could supply only one store. A warehouse built in London could supply two stores; a warehouse built in Rome could supply three stores; and a warehouse built in Bordeaux could supply four stores. The supply costs vary for each store, depending on which warehouse is the supplier. For example, a store that is located in Paris would have low supply costs if it were supplied by a warehouse also in Paris. That same store would have much higher supply costs if it were supplied by the other warehouses.

In a real world problem, the cost of building a warehouse would vary depending on warehouse location. To keep this problem simple in order to focus on search strategies, the cost of building any warehouse is set to 30.

The first step in modeling and solving a problem is to write a natural language description of the problem, identifying the decision variables and the constraints on these variables.

Write a natural language description of this problem. Answer these questions: