How to penalize values to use in Simplex

Question

Well, suppose there are three values:

A | B | C
3 | 2 | 10

The three values are prices of a item X in three different suppliers. However, there are three different delivery times:

    | A | B | C
   $| 3 | 2 | 10
TIME| 2 | 4 | 3 

How to penalize the values using the delivery time? I want to do this because I'm using Simplex from LpSolve (JAVA) to find the smallest value (Topic: How to find the optimal sum).

My first thought: Value * (Delivery time / Delivery time average)

Example above:

Delivery time average: 9/3 = 3
First value penalized: 3 * (2/3) = 2

A | B    | C
2 | 2.66 | 10

This is fair?

Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

It's fair if that is what you want. A generalisation of that approach would be to attach a cost for waiting, and minimise the total cost. The waiting time cost can either be real (e.g. a delivery delay is costing me $x per day to keep a workforce idle) or nominal (I am willing to pay $y to get something delivered a day earlier); both of these have the same form in practice - they add terms into the objective function.