Analytical Hierarchy Process Applied to Supermarket Layout Selection

In many cases, supermarkets are founded on rental of already built property and in this case, the space is accepted as is. It is imperative in this case that the supermarket be designed to achieve multiple objectives such as ease of roaming, display area, special display areas etc. It is important for any store to have a good design, because it will be reflected on the customer’s satisfaction, which in turn will increase sales and will ease customer flow. Several possible ready-made designs are available in the literature such as Grid, loop, and mixed. When implemented on the current space limitations, they can have different achievement for the objectives of the design. Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) represents a suitable technique for comparing these designs and reaching the final layout design selection. AHP layout selection is applied to a local supermarket and different layouts were generated. The design objectives are then evaluated for each of the layouts. It was concluded initially there is variability in the objectives achieved by the different designs, and a suitable multi-objective technique is required to select the final design. AHP is used to determine which of the designs was the most suitable through multiple comparison and consistency check. The results showed that the grid design was the most suitable for the current case study.