Famers markets location-allocation framework for public health enhancement

This paper aims to develop a location allocation framework of farmers markets to enhance public health. Farmers markets are beneficial to public health as they provide an access to households for healthy fresh foods, especially in the areas with a limited access to supermarkets (i.e., food deserts). To resolve the food deserts problem, the proposed framework adopts an Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), which enables the simulation to represent realistic dietary patterns of consumers explicitly considering individual's decision making behaviors. AnyLogic® ABS platform is utilized to implement the consumers' behavior models developed based on food consumption survey data (e.g., purchasing location, frequency, and healthfulness) on households in Inglewood, Los Angeles, California. OptQuest® is adopted as the optimization tool in the framework to find the optimum location of farmers markets in a competitive food retail environment involving three competitors: 1) fast-food restaurants 2) full-service restaurants, and 3) supermarkets. To test and demonstrate the proposed framework for public health enhancement, experiments with various pricing policies of farmers markets have been conducted. The experiment results reveal that the proposed location-allocation optimization framework effectively enhances public health under different pricing policies of farmers markets considering their relationships with other types of food stores.