The objective of this research was to determine the factors of Visual Merchandising on con-sumers’ purchase decision in retail stores in the districts of El Tambo and Huancayo, 2019. The study was carried out using the quantitative approach including the scientific method (general) and the deductive method (specific). In addition, the non-experimental - transversal - descriptive research design was used. The survey was used as a technique; applying two questionnaires, one for Visual Merchandising and the other for the purchase decision. The study sample was made up of 384 consumers aged between 20 and 60 years who went to retail stores in the districts of El Tambo and Huancayo and they were randomly selected for the application of the instrument. By means of the structural equation model, it was obtained that the organization of the outside of the business (OBA) had a significant influence on the cultural (p ≤ 0.05) and social (p ≤ 0.05) factors of the purchase decision; and a negative relation-ship with personal (p> 0.05) and psychological factors (p> 0.05). Regarding the organization of the interior of the business (OBI), it did not have any positive relationship with the purchase decision of the consumers of the retail stores surveyed (p> 0.05 for H5, H6, H7 and H8), due to the low knowledge that retailers have regarding the organization of the product at the point of sale. The environmental factors of the business (EFB) generated a positive impact on the cultural (p ≤ 0.05), personal (p ≤ 0.05) and psychological (p ≤ 0.05) purchase decision factors. However, they did not generate a positive impact on the social factor (p> 0.05) of the purchase decision (CSPD). It is concluded that the factors (exterior architecture, interior architecture, and atmosphere) of Visual Merchandising determine the purchase decision of consumers from retail stores in the central region of Peru (districts of El Tambo and Huancayo).

The competition manufacturing companies face has driven the development of novel and efficient methods that enhance the decision making process. In this work, a specific flow shop scheduling problem of practical interest in the industry is presented and formalized using a mathematical programming model. The problem considers a manufacturing system arranged as a work cell that takes into account the transport operations of raw material and final products between the manufacturing cell and warehouses. For solving this problem, we present a multiobjective metaheuristic strategy based on simulated annealing, the Pareto Archived Simulated Annealing (PASA). We tested this strategy on two kinds of benchmark problem sets proposed by the authors. The first group is composed by small-sized problems. On these tests, PASA was able to obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions in significantly short computing times. In order to complete the analysis, we compared these results to the exact Pareto front of the instances obtained with augmented ε-constraint method. Then, we also tested the algorithm in a set of larger problems to evaluate its performance in more extensive search spaces. We performed this assessment through an analysis of the hypervolume metric. Both sets of tests showed the competitiveness of the Pareto Archived Simulated Annealing to efficiently solve this problem and obtain good quality solutions while using reasonable computational resources.