Note: Facility location with closest rectangular distances

This paper considers the problem of locating one or more new facilities on a continuous plane, where the destinations or customers, and even the facil ities, may be represented by areas and not points. The objective is to loca te the facilities in order to minimize a sum of transportation costs. What is new in this study is that the relevant distances are the distances from the closest point in the facility to the closest point in the demand areas. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.