I thought of opening my own diner, but how to decide where to locate it ?
Note this is a generic model that can also be used to things like shopping malls, or even an service dealership , or any facility that is dependent on nearby population density.
Here is the approach and it is called Ohri Dhaba  Framework (in case you wish to use it, as I have the copyright ,thank you”)-
1) Take Google Earth or Any GIS data for mapping specific zones of City.
2) Use Market Research to get population density , income levels , ethnic preferences, age range , as well as probable customers for that kind of food/service/mall.
3) Use a KML (thats Google Earth format) parser to recover longitude and latitude of centroids of zones .
4) Add additional columns in each zone like other facilties like that (other malls in area)
5) Keep a shortlist of existing as well proposed new sites.
6) Make two circles for 3 km and 10 km penetration of the service from the existing sites and proposed sites.
7) using radius formula convert longitude and latitude to distance in km
8) Convert each site area into a mix of zonal areas (as in area1_3km = zone 1*A1 +zone2*A2…)
9) run regression on known sites ( whose customers are known) to get eventual customers , error terms and coefficients of additional columns in step 4
10) project probable customers of proposed sites.
11) Use feedback loop for changing time validation or percentage error term.
This is a framework for locating location sites using rules rather than gut instinct or pricing dynamics, etc. I am not sure how existing diners ,auto dealerships choose locations but that is more of perceived demand for new sites, and load on existing facilities rather than scientific. This may or maynot be patentable, as someone like X mart may have already built a facilty locating algorithm., but no framework exists to my knowledge.To the best of my knowledge there are many tools that help you locate a site, but no framework as such.
DECISION STATS 