Managing Limited Retail Space for Basic Products

To evaluate the performance of the heuristics used to compute the solutions under the space sharing and the space dedication strategies, we consider a broad range of parameters and generated 500 random problems instances, each comprising between 5 to 15 candidate product. We then computed the solutions provided by the appropriate algorithms and compared these solutions with the appropriate upper bound solution for each strategy. We define three different criteria for the comparison of performance between space sharing and space dedication strategies. We set the value of the last column to 1 if space sharing is better than dedication, -1 if space dedication is better than sharing, and 0 if the performance is similar. We present the results in three sheets which correspond to the three criteria of comparison.