Cook County needs to build two hospitals. There are nine cities where the hospitals can be built. The number of hospital visits made annually by the inhabitants of each city and the x and y coordinates of each city are listed in the file P08_24.xlsx. To minimize the total distance that patients must travel to hospitals, where should the hospitals be located? Solve the problem when people can travel in straight lines (“as the crow flies”) between cities. Then solve it when people must travel along a horizontal/vertical grid of roads. (Hint: Use lookup functions to generate the distances between each pair of cities.)
