A family of spatio-temporal location analysis problems of mobile trading

It is well known that central place theory explains the spatial organization of permanent service centers in geographic space. But so far there has not been a theory or a set of models that can be used to fully explain the spatio-temporal organization of periodic service centers such as periodic marketplaces. This is notable because many scholars from geography, anthropology, and operations research have been trying to establish adequate models for explaining the spatio-temporal organization of periodic marketplaces during the past 50 years. This article first introduces a family of eight classes of spatiotemporal location analysis problems related to a particular form of periodic marketing-mobile trading. It then presents a game theory model of two competing mobile traders as well as simulations on the synchronization of periodic marketplaces. Simulation results suggest that the synchronization of periodic marketplaces, resulting from the location patterns of two competing mobile traders, confirms the findings observed in empirical studies but does not follow those suggested by the consumer and the trader hypotheses. In addition, simulation results show that two competing traders agglomerate on a discrete linear structure.