Localización competitiva con valoraciones difusas de los clientes

Abstract

A competitive location problem with two firms consists of locating the facilities of these two firms in order to optimize certain objectives. Normally, the objective is to maximize the profit or the market share. For the leader-follower problem the decision making is sequential, first the leader opens its facilities and later the follower enter the market installing facilities in the locations considered more convenient for her/him. We consider that the user decision criterion is based on her/his perception of the time required moving to the facility. This travel time is of vague nature since the customer takes into account that it depends on several factors such as the traffic conditions. Therefore the customer choice is modeled using the theory of fuzzy sets. We propose and solve the leader-follower problem assuming that customers base their decision on the comparison of fuzzy times required to have access to the services established by each competitor. The fuzzy set theory is a rigorous and effective instrument for dealing with problems in which the information is vague.