Delimitating the store market field based on the metric of the city-block distance

Abstract

In social and economic activities,people usually actualize their spatial activities on road networks.However,most research results were on the ideal condition that geographical space was a homogeneous one,and almost all spatial analysis methods are according to the metric of planar Euclidean distance,its drawback is quite obvious.This paper presents the principle and the constructing method of network Voronoi diagrams,and the application of ordinary Voronoi diagram and network Voronoi diagram to the delimitation of the market fields of 17 stores in Wuhan,Hubei Province,China.The main results are as follows:(1) The market fields in the inner city are quite small while the ones in the outer city are a little large.If the road density in a store trade region was low,its area would be small;conversely,provided the road density in a store trade region was high,its area would be quite large.(2) There is a more or less difference between the application results of the methods based on ordinary Voronoi diagram and network Voronoi diagram.If the road density of a region was high,the difference would be small;and vice versa,there was a great difference in a region with a low road density.This shows that the method of ordinary Voronoi diagram can be chosen as a substitute of network Voronoi diagram to define the market fields of a store system in case of a region with a high road density.