Title: Product assignment using quadratic assignment model in retail

Authors: Bhawesh Sah; Rohit Titiyal; Desh Deepak Bhandari

Addresses: Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York 13902, USA ' Vinod Gupta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal, 721302, India ' Nucleus Software Exports Ltd., Noida, 201309, India

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of product assignment in retail. It solves the problem of assigning various products to various in-store locations so that there is increased sale as well as a better customer convenience. Retail managers often work out of intuition to place various products at various locations inside the retail store. While doing so, it is often seen that retail managers ignore the phenomenon of cross-selling. This study quantifies this problem and formulates it as a quadratic assignment problem which is solved by implementing a genetic algorithm. The resulting solution maximises cross-selling among products and at the same time improves customer convenience making it a win-win situation for everybody.

Keywords: quadratic assignment problem; QAP; genetic algorithm; product assignment; cross-selling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2019.097037

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2019 Vol.32 No.1, pp.25 - 43

Received: 03 Aug 2016
Accepted: 13 Jan 2017
Published online: 17 Dec 2018 *

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