Title
Competitive facility location problem with attractiveness adjustment of the follower: A bilevel programming model and its solution
Abstract
We are concerned with a problem in which a firm or franchise enters a market by locating new facilities where there are existing facilities belonging to a competitor. The firm aims at finding the location and attractiveness of each facility to be opened so as to maximize its profit. The competitor, on the other hand, can react by adjusting the attractiveness of its existing facilities with the objective of maximizing its own profit. The demand is assumed to be aggregated at certain points in the plane and the facilities of the firm can be located at predetermined candidate sites. We employ Huff’s gravity-based rule in modeling the behavior of the customers where the fraction of customers at a demand point that visit a certain facility is proportional to the facility attractiveness and inversely proportional to the distance between the facility site and demand point. We formulate a bilevel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model where the firm entering the market is the leader and the competitor is the follower. In order to find the optimal solution of this model, we convert it into an equivalent one-level mixed-integer nonlinear program so that it can be solved by global optimization methods. Apart from reporting computational results obtained on a set of randomly generated instances, we also compute the benefit the leader firm derives from anticipating the competitor’s reaction of adjusting the attractiveness levels of its facilities. The results on the test instances indicate that the benefit is 58.33% on the average.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.ejor.2010.08.009
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Competitive facility location,Bilevel programming,Mixed-integer nonlinear programming,Variable facility attractiveness
Mathematical optimization,Benefice,Global optimization,Bilevel optimization,Nonlinear programming,Facility location problem,Attractiveness,Profitability index,Integer programming,Operations management,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
208
3
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
24
0.96
25
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hande Küçükaydin1482.95
Necati Aras246230.62
I. Kuban Altinel315014.60