Greenfield Settings Explained

With Intelligent Greenfield Analysis, you have control over several different solve settings. For ease of use with scenario modeling, we have placed these settings in a dedicated table called Greenfield Settings. This will allow for quick scenario building that leverages the column names.

A full explanation of each setting can be found below:

• Max Number Of New Facilities – The maximum number of new facility locations to be opened during solve. This will include any Candidate Facilities that are selected as well as any Greenfield Facilities. This value is ignored if Minimize Total Facilities is set to True.
• Minimize Total Facilities – If True, the number of new facility locations to be opened will be minimized (Greenfield Facilities and Candidate Facilities). If False, the total cost (Facility Fixed Cost and Transportation Cost) will be minimized.
• Exclude Facilities – If True, all Facilities in the model will be ignored during the Greenfield run. This value is set to False if Only Use Facilities As Candidate Locations is set to True.
• Exclude Suppliers -If True, all Suppliers in the model will be ignored during the Greenfield run.
• Only Use Facilities As Candidate Locations – If True, the selection pool for Greenfield locations will be restricted to Facilities that are Included. Facilities with a Facility Status of ‘Open’ will be forced to open and have their fixed operating cost charged in the Greenfield solve. Facilities with a Facility Status of ‘Consider’ will have the option to be opened as a Candidate Facility location and if selected, their fixed operating cost will be charged.
• Customer Max Sourcing Distance – The maximum distance that any Customer can source a flow from a Greenfield Facility, a Candidate Facility, or an Existing Facility.
• Greenfield Facility Min Throughput -The minimum quantity of demand that a Greenfield Facility must service to be selected. This will apply to all Facilities, both new and existing, for the Greenfield solve.
• Greenfield Facility Max Throughput – The maximum quantity of demand that a single Greenfield Facility can service. For existing or candidate Facilities the throughput capacity will be specified in the Facilities table.
• Greenfield Facility Fixed Cost – The fixed cost applied to each Greenfield Facility used in the solve.
• Customer Fulfillment Cost – The cost charged for all flows from Facilities to Customers on a quantity-distance basis.
• Procurement Cost- The cost charged for all flows from Suppliers to Facilities on a quantity-distance basis.
• Run Location Refinement Heuristic – If True, the Greenfield Facilities selected by the solver can be improved beyond their initial location that would be co-located with a Customer / Cluster location.
• Customer Cluster Radius – The distance that Customers should be clustered over. The UOM of this distance measure is the primary distance UOM specified in the Model Settings table.
• Auto Detect Cluster Radius – If True, large models with more than 3000 customers will be automatically clustered to have less than 3000 nodes during the optimization phase. Clustomers are then disaggregated for outputs.
• Clustering Approach -The method used to identify customer clusters. The ‘fcluster’ method requires a computation of the full distance matrix between all customers pairs which can be a time consuming process. The ‘utm’ method is based on the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system looks to identify clusters in each UTM zone. While UTM based method may in some cases be less accurate it does not to precompute the full distance matrix between all customer pairs.