Locating Farmers Market

Most farmers’ markets operate on a weekly basis and they had to take this into account when creating these maps. Based on hours of operation, we can generally classify farmers’ markets into weekday morning noon markets, weekday afternoon evening markets, and weekend markets. Weekday morning noon markets usually run from 8am to 12pm or 9am to 1pm on weekdays. While these factors vary, we can still classify customers into two groups, workers and non-workers and assume that workers have regular work hours of 8am-5pm during weekdays.

The two models focus on identifying locations and associated operating times for farmers’ markets to maximize accessibility to all people in terms of travel distance. The PMP, or 'p-median problem', is a a mathematical formula used to asses a range of variants. Based on this PMP, this range of variants in the study can be explored more thoroughly. Additionally, studies have investigated alternative ways of modeling travel distance/time such as public transportation.

Tong, D., Ren, F., & Mack, J. (2012). Locating farmers’ markets with an incorporation of spatio-temporal variation. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 46(2), 149-156.