determining optimal location for processing industries in fars province: case of tomato processing industries

abstract fars province with a share of more than 16 percent holds the highest rank in producing tomato in iran. this study aims at determining priorities for tomato processing centers in fars province’s townships. to achieve the study objective a distance minimizing pattern was used for transportation network between producing and processing centers as well as processing and consumption centers. a part of the study data was collected using questionnaires completed by processing centers in 2009. the other part of the study data was obtained from the iranian agriculture ministry website. using the marginal distance measured by the optimal solution model, an average distance was calculated for paths ending in each township. the study findings revealed that paths ending in townships of marvdasht, shiraz, pasargad, eqlid and khorrambid lead to the lowest increase in total transferring. it was also found that the distance from consumption centers is important in determining the priority of townships, and hence the northern townships of fars province have more suitable position to establish new processing centers.