Tabu Search Based Competitive Location Model for Shopping Centers

Location of some facilities such as shopping centers has a crucial role in their success. Finding the location of a new shopping centers where there are existing ones belonging to competitors, asks to consider and evaluate confusing factors and objectives. In this research based on multiple objective decision making (MODM) approach, two objectives are considered to maximize the profit: maximizing demand response and maximizing accessibility to shopping centers. Demand objective is evaluate based on two criteria: population and competitive conditions. Accessibility is related to access to major roads, public transit stations, parking, parks and entertainment centers. There are many methods for solving multi-objective problems that have been generally divided into classic and evolutionary methods. Classical methods are faced with several shortcoming and recent researches are focused on utilizing the heuristicmethods. In the proposed model, first unsuitable locations are removed based on their land use and then Tabu Search, as a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, is used as a competitive location model for finding the location of new shopping centers based on the trade-off between objectives. The proposed model is tested in a case study area in Karaj city and the result is compared with traditional overly analysis.