Frank L. Hitchcock

Hitchcock defined the classic problem of how to supply many destinations from several warehouses at minimum cost, which every multi-node fulfillment network still has to solve. His 1941 paper set out the problem of distributing a product from several sources to numerous localities given shipping costs per unit, and it became a foundational case for linear programming. Koopmans and Dantzig later developed general solution methods. When a brand decides which fulfillment center should ship each order or how to split a purchase order across warehouses, it is solving a version of his problem.

• Distributed InventoryStock split across several warehouses
• Split ShipmentOne order sent in several packages

• Tjalling Koopmans1910–1985 · Economist of transportation optimization
• George Dantzig1914–2005 · Inventor of the simplex method
• Leonid Kantorovich1912–1986 · Pioneer of linear programming

1. Frank Lauren Hitchcock (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
2. The transportation problem, Hitchcock 1941 (John Burkardt, Florida State University) people.sc.fsu.edu