A heuristic approach for the sport equipment allocation and member recruiting management

Some practices arising in sport club industry include: (1) most sport clubs run their business by taking membership programs, and divide their memberships into several distinct classes by applying restrictions; (2) they operate in chain business mode and allow their members to enjoy their services at any affiliate; and (3) they usually recruit members as many as possible to increase their revenues. due to the limitless acceptance of customers' subscriptions, users usually face the situation that their preferred equipments are occupied. thus, in order to improve revenues and enhance corporate image, sport clubs can not only pay attention to the supply management of fitness equipment allocation, but also attempt on the demand management in terms of member recruiting limit. this study develops a mathematical model for determining the resource allocation of fitness equipments and the member recruiting limit decisions for a chain fitness club. the model is a constrained nonlinear integer problem, and in this paper a computational approach is proposed to solve the considered problem. numerical results show that the proposed heuristic approach can efficiently obtain compromised solutions.