Complicated Solver Problem

Hi,

I'm trying to develop an optimizer for a practical business problem. I'm thinking this might be a job for solver, but (1) I think it might surpass solver's variable limitations (maybe I can extend with VBA?), and (2) I'm curious if there's a simpler solution I'm overlooking.

This will make much more sense when you see the attachment, but basically: I have a list of stores (a few thousand stores), and I have two types products that I'm selling.
-My constraint is that I can only sell one type of product in each store (i.e. I can't sell Product A and B in Store 1. I can only sell one of those products in the store.)
-Furthermore, I'm choosing stores based on historical sales. I'd like to choose a combination of stores that results in the highest sum of historical sales for each product.
-Overall, I'd like to develop a solver set-up that would find an optimal solution (I think this is Evolutionary, so there wouldn't be just one good solution).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

SolverExample.xlsx

Originally Posted by shg

Why not just assign product A to the stores that sell more A than B, and vice versa?

BTW, Solver can't change that many variables, and if it could, the Sun would be a dark, cold cinder before it would be done.

Great, that's actually what I did, but I pasted values and removed the formula. Also, thanks for clearing that up about Solver. I figured it would be a long shot.

I'll try adding some VBA so that I can easily add/remove stores and adjust the totals manually.