Delineating store trade areas through morphological analysis

The precise knowledge of trade area limits is of importance for companies that want to accurately fit their marketing strategy to local features. Many methods have been already proposed in the literature but either they are too simple or often are at the same time approximate and expensive in computer times. This paper develops the framework of a new method based on mathematical morphology, a science usually used in image processing but not yet applied on data resulting from management sources. This method applied to the delineation of a trade area breaks up the acquisition of the data, filtering, segmentation and regularization of the area boundaries.