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The location and allocation of products and product families on retail shelves

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Abstract

In this paper, we model a shelf-management problem in which individual products are categorized as part of a product family. It is well known that a product’s shelf location has a significant impact on sales for many retail items. We develop a continuous as well as a discrete model with postprocessing to optimize product placement with consideration given to maintaining the grouping of product families. Computational results are reported on test problems as well as real-world beverage placement problems.

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Correspondence to Timothy L. Urban.

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Russell, R.A., Urban, T.L. The location and allocation of products and product families on retail shelves. Ann Oper Res 179, 131–147 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-008-0450-y

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