The profit in the retail business is influenced to a large extent by the store layout. Layout must be planned to increase sales. This is accomplished by showing the maximum amount of products within available store space. The focus of this study is on retail layout design and assignment of products to locations in the store with the objective of maximizing the overall store profit margin by optimizing exposure of the products in the store to potential customers.;The efficiency of the layout is evaluated by an objective function governed by the heuristic techniques to measure the profit margin earned by the store. This allocation process continues till the total profit for the store reaches near constant value.;Near optimal heuristic techniques, like genetic algorithm is used to find the best shortest route for the customers and simulated annealing is applied to the assignment of products in the store. The aim is keeping the products as far as possible to increase the travel distance for the customers traveling through their shortest route. This would increase the exposure of the products that are placed in the route. Simulated annealing is applied alternately to the allocation of must-haves and non must-haves, and both the allocations are dependent on each other.
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