The Research of Retail Sites Locations for Multistage Based on Scatter Search Heuristic Algorithm

Retail trade has always shown fluctuant characteristic such as customers demand, running expenses, etc. Retail sites locating is a critical aspect of its strategic planning and an improper locating stratagem would cause wasting resource and losing business opportunity. In the paper, we study the problem of retail sites locations of multistage so that retail firms can suit its environmental changing, which based on existing single period locations. The utility of each customer for a retail site is an important factor for his shopping. After analyzing scarcity of existing utility, we design stair-utility and use three different formularies expressing the utility. We propose a model of retail sites locations for multistage and design a scatter search algorithm according as the trait of our model. A material example is calculated by Lingo optimization software and scatter search algorithm respectively. The results with two different algorithms show that the scatter search algorithm has excellent performance in calculative speed and astringency.