Towards Optimal Multi-item Shopping Basket Management: Heuristic Approach

Shopping as a social activity may be a source of pleasure even if the shopping is very expensive. However, in many real-life situations customers are interested to buy products at possibly low prices. A shopping paradigm based on price comparison may be applied for both: buying in traditional shops and internet shopping. Unfortunately, price comparison applications available nowadays are focused on supporting customers in single product selection. Because of computational complexity, there is no support for managing multiple-item shopping basket optimization. Problem of optimal realization of multiple-item customer basket in Internet shops was proved to be NP-hard in computational sense. In the paper we propose a heuristic approach to optimizing shopping basket and report results of computational experiment. An application based on proposed algorithm provides an instant support for a customer while he builds his basket of products to be purchased.