Co-location Cluster Formation
TopicFrom the Woodfine Projects
Co-location Cluster Formation
Cluster formation is the step in the co-location index pipeline that turns qualifying anchor stores into candidate clusters. Every qualifying anchor store — each hypermarket, home-improvement superstore, and warehouse club that has independently committed capital within 1.0 to 3.0 km of the others — generates one candidate cluster centred on that store's coordinates.
Because each anchor produces its own candidate, a single commercial zone with several adjacent anchors yields several overlapping clusters that describe the same trade area. Those overlaps are resolved downstream by the deduplication step before trade-area inputs are aggregated for the ranking system.
Cluster formation does not score or rank. It only enumerates candidate clusters from the qualification logic; qualification, formation, and anchor adjacency are the three structural inputs to the index.