Retailers location choice based on shopping and land prices

Abstract

For the success of a retailer, stores location is considered as one of the most important factors. In the evaluation of a location, contextual to the opening or the relocation of a shop, different aspects should be considered like accessibility, land price, applicable prices in the area, competition, etc. The work reported in this paper extends a previous effort which integrated an agent-based module of retailers’ location decision into the multi-agent transport simulation (MATSim). The module tries to find a constellation of stores which increases the number of customers and turnover for the retailer, based on the different shopping and land prices in the simulated area. The functionality of the module has been demonstrated on the ”Greater-Zurich” scenario, where real grocery retail stores of the area are modeled. The results obtained show a significant increase in both number of customers and turnover. Finally, possible limitations and necessary improvements of the developed module are presented.