Question

1. The Major Motors Corporation manufactures heavy trucks at a plant in Dublin,-Virginia. The factory’s stock of spare and custom parts is stored in a huge shelving system that is several stories high and runs the length of several football fields. An automated "cherry picking" vehicle runs back and forth along a shelving unit and is able to simultaneously raise or lower to any height to pick needed stock items from the various bins in the shelving unit. Each bin in the shelving unit is of equal size and is identified by a specific row and column number. Typically, each run the cherry picker makes involves visiting several different bins to retrieve various parts. To help minimize operating costs, the company wants to develop a system to determine the most efficient way for the cherry picker to visit each required bin site before returning to its initial position. As an example, suppose the cherry picker needs to retrieve 10 parts stored in the following bin locations.

   Part	Row	Column
   1	3	27
   2	14	22
   3	1	13
   4	20	3
   5	20	16
   6	28	12
   7	30	31
   8	11	19
   9	7	3
   10	10	25

   Assume the cherry picker must start and finish at row 0 and column 0.

   1. Use a spreadsheet to compute the straight-line distance between each pair of bin locations.

   2. Use Solver’s Evolutionary algorithm to determine the shortest tour for the cherry picker to follow.

   3. What is the best tour you can find?

Identify decision variables, objective functions, and constraints if applicable

Answer 1