Abstract
This paper aims at determining the optimal number of new facilities besides specifying both the optimal location and design level of them under the budget constraint in a competitive environment by a novel hybrid continuous and discrete firefly algorithm. A real-world application of locating new chain stores in the city of Tehran, Iran, is used and the results are analyzed. In addition, several examples have been solved to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm. The results demonstrate that the performed method provides good-quality results for the test problems.
Highlights
Many factors should be considered when locating new facilities, and one of the most important is the existence of the competitors that offer the same products or services in a market
This paper aims at determining the optimal number of new facilities besides specifying both the optimal location and design level of them under the budget constraint in a competitive environment by a novel hybrid continuous and discrete firefly algorithm
‘‘A location model is said to be about competitive facilities when it explicitly incorporates the fact that other facilities are already/will be present in the market and that the new facility/facilities will have to compete with them for its/their market share’’ (Plastria 2001)
Summary
Many factors should be considered when locating new facilities, and one of the most important is the existence of the competitors that offer the same products or services in a market. Aboolian et al (2007) developed a model in which the optimal location and design of a set of facilities are obtained They considered that the demand is elastic and increases with the enhancement of customer utility. Fernandez et al (2007) determined the optimal location and design of a new facility in Huff-like model in a plane space These authors solved their previous model by considering different spatial pattern and conditions of parameters and offered the necessary insights to the modelers for noticing these factors in the obtained results (Toth et al 2009). Other examples and the respective computational results are analyzed in ‘‘Computational experiments’’, and, ‘‘Conclusion’’ provides the conclusions and suggestions for further research
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