Maximizing Dealership Profitability

The project that introduced me to decision-making

This is nothing but a course project on Combinatorial Optimization, where the group have to utilize every bit of learnt knowledge and apply it to a real-world problem. This project is under the context of maximizing profit of a used-car dealership(not a real one, of course!) by managing the number of cars to buy in, constraint by budget and storage size. Our group utilzied both linear programming solver and heuristics algorithms (I wrote two of them!), and compared their performance.

Given a fixed constraint, each solver gives a different answer.

Just to make the problem a little bit more challenging, we also asked for two more specific constraints:

  1. if the bought cars has any imported cars, there is a one-time licensing fee the dealership has to pay
  2. if the bought cars has any hybrid cars, there is a one-time infrastruction fee the dealership has to pay to upgrade their storage lot with charger posts!

Below is the performance comparison between two greedy algorithms.

Number of Cars sold by two greedy algorithms, varying budget (Left) and parking lot size (Right) constraint from zero to total size of all available cars

The link to project repository is Here