Comparative Analysis of Store Opening Strategy Based on Movement Behavior Model over Urban Street Networks

Abstract

In this study, we address the problem of identifying trade-areas of facilities, such as convenience stores, gas stations, and supermarkets, based on closeness centrality and betweenness centrality while considering the target city a spatial network. When placing a new facility in a local area, locating it with high accessibility for neighboring residents can attract customers from existing facilities and expand its own trade-area. Therefore, it is important to properly grasp the trade-area of existing facilities. To this end, we consider two movement behavior models of people. In the first model, which is an existing model, the trade-area of each facility is extracted by Voronoi tessellation against its installation site, which assumes that each resident goes to the nearest facility. In the second model, which is our proposed model, it is extracted by the proportion including the facility on the shortest paths from the resident’s departure point to various destinations in the network. Based on these models, we propose a selection probability that a resident selects a facility, and attempt to extract trade-area of each facility. From experimental evaluations using actual road networks and location information of the convenience stores, we confirmed that the existing model extracts the trade-areas of each store with good balance; in the proposed model, the trade-area of stores located along the main road becomes wider. By analyzing the entropy of selection probabilities, it was confirmed that the competitiveness of existing stores can be understood and can be used as an evaluation measure when determining candidate locations for new store openings.