Related papers: Capacity, Collision Avoidance and Shopping Rate un…

We study a model of retail agglomeration where consumers are more likely to visit zones with a higher concentration of shops. This agglomerative effect makes zones with many retailers more attractive. The spatial distribution of retailers…

In the present work, we study how the number of simulated clients (occupancy) affects the social distance in an ideal supermarket. For this, we account for realistic typical dimensions and process time (picking products and checkout). From…

We present a simple dynamic equilibrium model for an online exchange where both buyers and sellers arrive according to a exogenously defined stochastic process. The structure of this exchange is motivated by the limit order book mechanism…

We consider the problem of customer equilibrium strategies in an M/M/1 queue under dynamic service control. The service rate switches between a low and a high value depending on system congestion. Arriving customers do not observe the…

The analysis and characterization of human mobility using population-level mobility models is important for numerous applications, ranging from the estimation of commuter flows in cities to modeling trade flows between countries. However,…

We introduce the logistic model of consumption growth, which captures a negative feedback loop preventing an unlimited growth of consumption due to finite biophysical resources of our planet. This simple dynamic model allows for derivation…

In the supermarket model there are n queues, each with a unit rate server. Customers arrive in a Poisson process at rate \lambda n, where 0<\lambda <1. Each customer chooses d > 2 queues uniformly at random, and joins a shortest one. It is…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption, particularly in retail. Where essential demand cannot be fulfilled online, or where more stringent measures have been relaxed, customers must visit shop premises in person. This…

We consider a retailer selling a single product with limited on-hand inventory over a finite selling season. Customer demand arrives according to a Poisson process, the rate of which is influenced by a single action taken by the retailer…

Competition for a limited resource is the hallmark of many complex systems, and often, that resource turns out to be the physical space itself. In this work, we study a novel model designed to elucidate the dynamics and emergence in complex…

Motivated by the need of {\em social distancing} during a pandemic, we consider an approach to schedule the visitors of a facility (e.g., a general store). Our algorithms take input from the citizens and schedule the store's discrete…

Pedestrian studies in retail areas are critical for comfort and convenience in transportation facility designs. But existing literature lacks detailed empirical observations that focus on pedestrian speed variations and their mechanisms in…

This paper combines a canonical epidemiology model of disease dynamics with government policy of lockdown and testing, and agents' decision to social distance in order to avoid getting infected. The model is calibrated with data on deaths…

We consider the problem of maximizing the number of people that a dining room can accommodate provided that the chairs belonging to different tables are socially distant. We introduce an optimization model that incorporates several…

Motivated by recent challenges in the deployment of robots into customer-facing roles within retail, this work introduces a study of customer activity in physical stores as a step toward autonomous understanding of shopper intent. We…

One of the major barriers for the retailers is to understand the consumption elasticity they can expect from their contracted demand response (DR) clients. The current trend of DR products provided by retailers are not consumer-specific,…

We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…

The consumer store is ubiquitous and plays an important role in our everyday lives. It is an open question why stores usually have such short life cycles (typically around 3 years in China). This paper proposes a theoretical framework based…

Assortment optimization is a critical tool for online retailers aiming to maximize revenue. However, optimizing purely for revenue can lead to unbalanced sales across products, potentially causing a long tail of low-selling products and…

For transportation hubs, leveraging pedestrian flows for commercial activities presents an effective strategy for funding maintenance and infrastructure improvements. However, this introduces new challenges, as consumer behaviors can…