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上投入了大量资源。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。如果执行不当，可能会导致严重的低效率、高运营成本和低质量。多年来，有效地规划制造和物流设施的布局一直是人们关注的焦点。相比之下，零售设施的设计和规划却很少受到重视，尽管零售业对整体经济非常重要。零售布局问题与制造/物流布局问题有几个显著的不同：(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)顾客的需求是高度可变和不可预测的；(3)顾客经常在最初的购物清单上增加他们在设施逗留期间遇到的冲动物品；(4)零售设施本质上是自助式设施；(5)除了结账外，顾客是服务机制的组成部分。本研究的目标是建立一个框架，用于定量地设计零售设施。我们的活动集中于客户需求建模、客户流特征和制定合适的优化问题(S)，包括为工厂中客户路径的物理布局和产品系列的排序指定适当的目标函数和约束条件。我们打算将重点放在非传统布局上，我们认为这些布局可能会显著优于许多零售设施中常见的基于过道的传统布局。虽然这项研究是探索性的，但它将建立在制造设施布局研究的悠久历史之上。此外，我们相信，这项研究有可能将运筹学技术扩展到一个过去被忽视的重要经济部门。此外，本研究还将为教学设施设计开辟一个新的领域。这将为将零售设施布局引入设施设计课程奠定基础，设施设计课程是工业工程课程中常见的核心课程。

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.