Patent ID: 8458008

Claim:
A method of determining at least one location for a retail outlet in a market region comprising: partitioning the market region into a fixed number of sub-regions; computing marginal increments from input data for each of said sub-regions, wherein a local search algorithm is used to calculate a value of said marginal increment, said computing said marginal increments comprising: for a sub-region A i , denoting a maximal evaluation score by allocating k facilities in said sub-region as f(A i ,k), said f(A i ,k) being obtained by said local search algorithm; for the sub-region A i , defining a marginal increment having k outlet facilities as d(A i , k+1)=f(A i , k+1)−f(A i ,k); setting m 1 , m 2 , . . . , m L to 0, where m 1 , m 2 , . . . , m L denote the number of outlet facilities assigned to A 1 , A 2 , . . . , A L , computing a marginal increment d(A i , m i +1) for each sub-region A i ; obtaining a maximal marginal increment d max and a corresponding sub-region index i max ; setting m i max to m i max +1; and outputting said m 1 , m 2 , . . . , m L ; and choosing a sub-region having a maximum value among the computed marginal increments for said at least one location of said retail outlet, wherein a processor device performs one or more of: said partitioning, said computing and said choosing.