Competitive Facility Location Using Clustering of Customers

Competitive facility location focus on locating facilities by considering the fact of competition in businesses, so every facilities try to reach their reachable shares through competition. Reachable shares have an indirect relation with the distance of facilities to the customer and a direct relation with the attractiveness of the facility. Attractiveness of any facility is depend on variety of reasons such as quality and price. All these factors have a special weight for each customer in different places. In this proposed model, mentioned factors are considered and customers are classified in different branches which in every one of these branches price and quality have different weights. The model is solved in three step. In the first step attractiveness of the facility will be clear, in the second step suitable place for location will be specified and finally at the final step the quality and price of new facility in optimized place will be shown. An example is solved at the end to validate the model.