Development of gravitational models for gasoline sales

This paper describes the development of models for the sales of liquid fuels in service stations, which will inform decision making in the area of evaluation of sales of new service station locations. A gravitational model for a market area located in an urban peripheral district of Portugal was developed, parameter estimation being accomplished through a log-centered transformation. The implementation of the gravitational models leads to the development of the regression model of the total consumption of the market area. The final gravitational model with an absolute global error of 17% includes, as explanatory variables, the travel time, the capacity and the visibility of the service station. The models which have a smaller error are those where proximity was measured by the travel time between home and the service station rather than by distance in kilometres.