Modeling supermarket re-layout from the owner’s perspective

It is well-known that if a customer follows a longer path while shopping then the expected value of his/her purchased amount is increased; therefore the sale amount of the supermarket can be increased. This study deals with a new problem: how to re-layout a supermarket the impulsive purchases of the average customer are maximized. Supermarket is a shop of limited size and is definitely smaller than the hypermarket. It is assumed that it is located in a living area and customers know its layout well. In many countries, there are plenty of shops like that. In a case study 27 clusters of customers are defined based on 13,300 real buying. To assume that actors behave in a rational way, is traditional in analysis of economic problems. Rationality means in that case that customers choose the shortest possible path according to their a priori purchase plan. Thus, traveling salesman problem (TSP) can be used to simulate the customer’s shopping path. Dantzig–Fulkerson–Johnson formulation of TSP is used to maximize the shortest traveled path of each customer type by rearranging the items of the supermarket as a max–min problem. The computational experiences on the case study show that the total distance is increased in the new layout proposed by the model.