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Intelligent mobile vending services: location optimisation for food trucks using coalitional game theory

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Abstract

The food truck industry has seen substantial expansion in the past few years. Mobile service flexibility, low capital expenditure and overhead costs are some of the reasons for making it a popular venture choice to enter the hospitality industry. It is important for these mobile vendors to discover locations with high demand and purchase capacity, while facing low competition from competing eateries. A novel spatio-temporal multi-objective optimization approach, developed using a metaheuristic algorithm based on the principles of coalitional game theory, has been presented in this paper for allocating optimal retail locations in a spatio-temporal competitive multi-agent environment. Multi-agent competition has been modeled using a number of socio-economic parameters to better emulate the dynamic spatio-temporal behavior of urban crowds and buying power. The proposed algorithm has shown to solve the problem more effectively than existing combinatorial optimization algorithms. Moreover, the proposed approach shows how coalitional game theory can produce a set of Pareto optimal solutions for multi-objective optimization problems involving competitive multi-agent.

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Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from [9] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [9].

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology Pune, Pune, Maharashtra, 411048, India

    Umang Kalra, Ashish Kumar & Tanmoy Hazra

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  1. Umang Kalra
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Kalra, U., Kumar, A. & Hazra, T. Intelligent mobile vending services: location optimisation for food trucks using coalitional game theory. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 9477–9490 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13758-3

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