Heuristics for the shelf space allocation problem

Abstract

The retailers’ goals to maximize the profit of the products in stores are realized on the planogram shelves. In this paper, we investigated a practical shelf space allocation model with a visible horizontal and vertical grouping of products into categories, which takes into account the number of facings, capping and nesting of a product. The result is four groups of constraints, such as shelf constraints, product constraints, multi-shelves constraints, and category constraints that are used in the model. We proposed 6 heuristics to solve the planogram profit maximization problem. The developed techniques on which heuristics are based may be applied to other category of management shelf space allocation problems because all of them share the same nature of the problem, i.e., the initial step of creating the allocation of products on the shelf and steps in which shelves are combined. Experiments were based on data sets generated according to contemporary real retail conditions. The efficiency of the designed heuristics has been estimated using the CPLEX solver.