Heuristic approach for automated shelf space allocation

Shelf space allocation is the problem of efficiently arranging retail products on shelves in order to maximise profit, improve stock control, improve customer satisfaction, etc. Most work reported in the literature on this problem has focused on the case of large retailers such as big supermarkets. The interest here is to tackle this problem in the context of small retail shops where different issues arise when compared to large retailers. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to automate shelf space allocation in small retail shops. Several initialisation heuristics and local search moves are incorporated into the proposed method which generates high quality practical arrangements represented graphically as simple planograms.