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25 Aug 2006
Unit:
Wageningen UR
August 25th, 15:00-15:45
Operations Research and Logistics Group
Leeuwenborch, Mansholtzaal
Searching the feasible space to find the global optimum of a Huff-like competitive location problem
In a market a company wants to build a new facility (shop) which will be surrounded by competitors and customers. The decision of customers to go to one shop or another depends on the distances to- and the qualities of the facilities. To maximize profits, both the optimal location as well as the optimal quality of the new facility has to be found. This is a Huff-like competitive location problem because of the probabilistic instead of deterministic behavior of consumers. The research focuses on the applicability of a general Branch-and-Bound method to solve this problem. The question is how effective and efficient such a method can be designed. The formal mission of the project is to investigate the possibility of developing a general Branch-and-Bound global optimization algorithm that is quick, relatively easy to implement but anyhow able to find the global optimum of a Huff based competitive location problem.
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