Exploratory Research: A New Paradigm for the Design of Retail Facilities

制造和服务企业在工厂和仓库的设计和运营方面投入了大量资源。 如果执行得当，这些设施的物理配置可以简化材料和产品的流动。 如果执行不力，可能导致严重的效率低下、运营成本高和质量差。 多年来，许多注意力都集中在有效规划制造和物流设施的布局上。 相比之下，尽管零售业对整体经济至关重要，但零售设施的设计和规划却很少受到关注。 零售布局问题与制造/物流布局问题在几个重要方面不同：（1）零售设施的目标是最大化销售，而不是最小化旅行时间或物料移动;（2）客户需求是高度可变和不可预测的;（3）客户经常增加初始购物清单，他们在逗留期间遇到的冲动项目通过设施;（4）零售设施本质上是自助服务设施;（5）除结账外，顾客是服务机制中不可或缺的一部分。本研究的目标是发展一个零售设施设计定量方法的框架。 我们的工作重点是客户需求建模、客户流程特征化和制定合适的优化问题，包括为客户路径的物理布局和设施中产品系列的排序指定适当的目标函数和约束条件。 我们打算专注于非传统的布局，我们认为这可能会大大优于传统的过道布局常见于许多零售设施。虽然这项研究是探索性的，它将建立在长期的研究历史的布局制造设施。 此外，我们相信这项研究有可能将运筹学技术扩展到过去被忽视的重要经济部门。 此外，本研究也将为教学设施设计开辟一个新的领域。 它将为将零售设施布局引入设施设计课程提供基础，这些课程是工业工程课程中的共同核心课程。

Manufacturing and service enterprises invest significant resources in the design and operation of factories and warehouses. If properly executed, the physical configuration of these facilities can simplify the flow of material and products. If poorly executed, it can lead to severe inefficiencies, high operating costs, and poor quality. Over the years, much attention has been focused on effectively planning the layout of manufacturing and logistical facilities. In contrast, the design and planning of retail facilities has been given little attention despite the importance of the retail sector to the overall economy. Retail layout problems differ from manufacturing/logistics layout problems in several significant ways: (1) the objective of retail facilities is to maximize sales rather than to minimize travel time or material moves; (2) customer demand is both highly variable and unpredictable; (3) customers often augment an initial shopping list with impulse items that they encounter in their sojourn through the facility; (4) retail facilities are essentially self service facilities; (5) and except for checkout, customers are an integral part of the service mechanism.The goal of this research is to develop a framework for a quantitative approach to the design of retail facilities. Our activities are focused on modeling customer demand, characterizing customer flow, and formulating suitable optimization problem(s), including specifying an appropriate objective function and constraints for both the physical layout of customer paths and the sequencing of product families in the facility. We intend to focus on non-traditional layouts that we believe may significantly outperform traditional aisle-based layouts commonly found in many retail facilities. While this research is exploratory in nature, it will build on the long history of research in layout for manufacturing facilities. Moreover, we believe this research has the potential to extend operations research techniques to an important economic sector that has been overlooked in the past. Additionally, this research will open a new area for teaching facility design. It will provide the foundation for introducing retail facility layout into facility design courses, which are common core courses in industrial engineering curricula.