Forming central warehouses for a number of stores can save costs in the continuous review inventory model due to economy of scale and information sharing. In this paper, transportation costs are included in this inventory model. Hence, the tradeoff between inventory-related costs and transportation costs is required. The main concern of this paper is to determine the number and location of central warehouses. Transportation costs are dependent on the distance from several central warehouses to each store. Hence, we develop an efficient simulated annealing algorithm using distance-based local search heuristic and merging heuristic to determine the location and the number of central warehouses. The objective of this paper is to minimize total costs such as holding, setup, penalty, and transportation costs. The performance of the proposed approach is tested by using some computational experiments.