Research On Shopping Guide Route Planning Strategies In Supermarket

With the rapid development of national economy, to go shopping in supermarkets has become an essential part of life for modern urban residents. There are various products in supermarkets, making customers have more choices, but on the other hand the abundant goods, together with the complexity of spatial indoor layout let people easy to get lost in the room. Thus, it is feasible to improve customers’ shopping experience by offering a convenient shopping route guide while providing approving items.In this paper a personalized recommendation strategy for shopping guide routes in supermarkets was proposed, including modeling indoor spatial environment, planning shortest shopping guide routes and designing optimal routes. After analyzing the indoor layouts of one supermarket, combined with the products placing strategy, the walking aisles were discretized into several zones, and an undirected graph model was built in which nodes and undirected edges represented the walking zones and walking routes between two adjacent zones respectively. Given a shopping list, the products on it were mapped to corresponding zones, and a shortest shopping route linked with the entrance, the target goods zones and the check-out counter was generated based on genetic algorithm. The optimal guiding routes, on the other hand, were designed with content-based products recommendation technique and the shortest path planning method. Firstly, with data about goods attributes and consumers’ shopping records, a product model and consumer model were constructed respectively on the dimension of sub-classes based on data mining techniques such as association rules. Then an interest matrix between consumers and products was computed based on cosine similarity measuring method. At last some products one consumer may be interested were considered when planning a shopping route for the purpose of giving unexpected experience.Simulation experiments were conducted in Matlab to verify our shopping guide routes planning strategy. The results show that the proposed method is simple, stable and efficient, it can quickly recommend a best route to the target consumer for decisions.