Model and algorithm of multistage facility location for retail trade

Aiming at the problem of retail site location,to improve existing utility functions in competitive facility location models,a piecewise utility function was designed,in which the influence of distance from the inhabitancy of customers to retail sites was discriminated by three forms in utility function:the distance without affecting customers' utility,directly affecting customers' utility and absolutely affecting customers' utility.Under this circumstance,a multistage retail sites location model was built so that matching customers' demand distribution and running cost of retail sites at different stages would be matched,and an effective scatter search heuristic algorithm was devised according to the model characteristics.An example and a set of simulation experiments were calculated by the proposed scatter search heuristic algorithm and Lingo system.Solution results showed that the precision of solutions and solving times with scatter search algorithm were superior to those of Lingo system.