Finding Effective Item Assignment Plans with Weighted Item Associations Using A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm

By identifying useful relationships between massive datasets, association rule mining can provide new insights to decision-makers. Item assignment models based on association between items are used to place items in a retail or e-commerce environment to increase sales. However, existing models fail to combine these associations with item-specific information, such as profit and purchasing frequency. To find effective assignments with item-specific information, we propose a new hybrid genetic algorithm that incorporates a robust tabu search with a novel rectangular partially matched crossover, focusing on rectangular layouts. Interestingly, we show that our item assignment model is equivalent to popular quadratic assignment NP-hard problems. We show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, using benchmark instances from QAPLIB and synthetic databases that represent real-life retail situations, and compare our algorithm with other existing algorithms. We also show that the proposed crossover operator outperforms a few existing ones in both fitness values and search times. The experimental results show that not only does the proposed item assignment model generates a more profitable assignment plan than the other tested models based on association alone but it also obtains better solutions than the other tested algorithms.