Matlog: Logistics Engineering Matlab Toolbox

The Matlab Toolbox Matlog was developed for use in the course ISE 754 at NCSU. The toolbox contains functions for solving the following types of problems:

Facility location: Continuous minisum facility location, alternate location-allocation (ALA) procedure, discrete uncapacitated facility location
Vehicle routing: VRP, VRP with time windows, traveling salesman problem (TSP)
Networks: Shortest path, min cost network flow, minimum spanning tree problems
Geocoding: U.S. city or ZIP code to longitude and latitude, longitude and latitude to nearest city, Mercator projection plotting
Layout: Steepest descent pairwise interchange (SDPI) heuristic for QAP
General purpose: Linear programming using the revised simplex method procedure, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)
Data: U.S. cities with populations of at least 10,000, U.S. highway network (Oak Ridge National Highway Network), U.S. 3- and 5-digit ZIP codes

Matlog Reference

Matlog Reference (HTML) provides a listing of help information for each function in the Matlog toolbox.

Matlab References

Basic Concepts in Matlab, provides a short overview of Matlab.

The Documentation, Manuals, and Tutorials on the MathWorks website (the developers of Matlab) provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference source for Matlab; in particular, Getting Started (HTML) or (PDF) provides a good introduction to Matlab.

Installing Matlog

If connected to the NCSU network:

Before using the toolbox for the first time and before starting Matlab, you should copy the file startup.m to your home directory. This file creates a path to the toolbox each time you start Matlab. Matlog is then accessible only from the NCSU network. Other commands that you would like to have executed each time you start Matlab can also be added to the file; for example, the format compact command is at the end of the file and is used to eliminate the blank lines that would otherwise appear between each line of output at the command window.

First time using toolbox, copy startup.m file to your home directory:

http://www.ise.ncsu.edu/kay/matlog/startup.m

Keep this file in the directory that opens when you start Matlab.

Execute startup.m. each time you start Matlab.

If accessing local install of Matlog:

To use Matlog on an off-campus network, you will need a local version of Matlog. Copy the following zipped file containing the Matlog directory to your local computer:

matlog.zip (4.7 MB)

Extracting the file will create the folder matlog. You should then update Matlog by using one of the methods described below. It is quickest to manually update via updates.zip when Matlog is first installed, and then automatically thereafter using matlogupdate.

Assuming you are using Version R2009a of Matlab and that you have placed Matlog into your C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2009a\toolbox\local\ folder, the following statements can be used for your startup.m file by saving them as a new file or adding them to an existing startup.m file (you should not use the NCSU network startup.m file on when not connected to the campus network).

% Example startup.m file to access local install of Matlog

path(path, 'C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2009a\toolbox\local\matlog')  % Put extracted matlog folder here

matlogupdate                                                       % Run to check for Matlog updates

format compact                                                     % Run to eliminate blank lines

Updating Matlog

Individual files in Matlog will change on a regular basis (e.g., fixing errors). The entire Matlog zip file is not updated as frequently. Instead, there are two ways to get the updates:

Automatically: The Matlog function matlogupdate.m can be run to automatically download updates to Matlog files. You can add matlogupdate.m to your startup.m file to have it check for updates each time you start Matlab.
Manually: All of the updated files are available in the zipped file updates.zip (this method will work if, for some reason, matlogupdate is not working). Extract the files and then copy them into your Matlog folder, replacing any existing files of the same name. A new updates.zip file is created each time Matlog is updated.

See log file for a list of Matlog updates to date.

Contact

Michael G. Kay, Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.