In recent years, several different types of retail point-of-sale (POS) devices have been developed, in addition to the traditional, fixed registers. They include self-checkout devices and mobile devices which can be installed quickly for temporary use during peak retail seasons. A retail store has to determine the number and type of POS devices it needs in order to serve its customers satisfactorily. We develop an optimization model to find the mix of devices that results in the lowest total cost of owning and operating the devices over their life span. The model was applied to help an IBM client plan a POS device renewal in its chain of 400 stores.
By: Ying Tat Leung; Mayank Sharma; Anupam Singh; Myron Flickner
Published in: RJ10420 in 2007
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