A multi-criteria competitive facility location model and its solution

We are concerned with a problem in which a firm wants to set up several facilities in a competitive environment. The goal of the firm is to maximize its market share within its service radius. A new utility function based on market research is proposed and facility attributes, such as size, distance, service radius and price are considered. These factors weights are obtained by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) instead of empirical estimate. Furthermore we discuss the application of our models to a case, and ant colony algorithm is used in order to find the optimal solution.