Company B has twenty petrol stations across Melbourne. It is creating strategies to 

consolidate warehouse operations so that there will be three warehouses that supply the 

stations. The company plans to sell all its extant warehouses and build new, state-of-the-art 

warehouses. Each warehouse can supply multiple stations; however, each station will be 

supplied by a single warehouse. The location of each station is summarised in the table 

below:

Suburb X Y Suburb X Y

Ascot Vale 25 13.8 Laverton North 13.5 7.2

Avondale Heights 19.7 14.2 Melbourne 28.6 8.9

Brooklyn 18.2 9.4 Seabrook 10.9 2.3

Burnside 10.7 16.2 Southbank 29.8 8.1

Caroline Springs 9.7 16.8 St Kilda 30.4 3.4

Derrimut 10.7 10.2 Sunshine West 16.6 10.2

Flemington 24.3 11.8 Tarneit 5.2 8.1

Footscray 22.4 11 Tarneit 5.1 6.6

Footscray 23.7 11.1 Werribee 0.5 0

Hoppers Crossing 6.3 4.7 Wyndham Vale 0 2

The company wants to build its warehouses in locations that minimise the distances to each 

of the stations it serves. Formulate a non-linear programming (NLP) model for this problem 

in a Word file with a brief description of an equation, and implement the NLP model in an 

Excel spreadsheet. What do the results suggest?