A Case Study for Minimal Cost Shopping in a Cluster of Online Stores

Abstract

This work proposes and evaluates mechanisms to converge to the purchase configuration with minimal cost for a product list in an online stores cluster. We collected and stored product prices in a database, and used caching to reduce client response time. We designed, implemented, and compared two Integer Linear Programming solutions to achieve purchase configuration with minimal cost. A case study was conducted to evaluate these mechanisms. The results demonstrated that developed mechanisms found optimal solutions with response time guarantees. Empirical tests in the case study with 100 different products and 118 providers converged in about 9 seconds.