Renacin Matadeen

An Open-Source Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Toolkit to Calculate Retail Site Attractiveness for the Huff Model ©2019

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), with Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) as one of its most common techniques, is an approach to combining multiple variables into a single index. In this research, MCDA was examined as a solution to the challenge of modeling attractiveness in estimating retail patronage using the Huff Model. Due to the impact of data standardization, specific focus was placed on comparing the results of three standardization procedures. Following the development of a QGIS plugin, a case study was implemented to create an attractiveness index built using WLC that made use of either Score Range, Max Score, or Z-Score techniques. It was confirmed that MCDA is useful for the development of Huff models, although the selection of a standardization procedure has a noticeable impact on the resulting trade areas.