The location and allocation of products and product families on retail shelves

In this paper, we model a shelf-management problem in which individual products are categorized as part of a product family. It is well known that a product's shelf location has a significant impact on sales for many retail items. We develop a continuous as well as a discrete model with postprocessing to optimize product placement with consideration given to maintaining the grouping of product families. Computational results are reported on test problems as well as real-world beverage placement problems.