Splitting up buyer amounts to match seller amounts

Hello all,

I have a set of shareholders that have been given an equal amount of cash and stocks, but some want more cash and some want more stocks. There is a different number of buyers and sellers, but the total amount that is being bought/sold is the same.

My predicament is that none of the buyer amounts match up or add up evenly into any of the seller amounts. My only solution is to split up the buyer amounts into different parts of each whole and then use combinations of all those parts to cleanly match every seller amount.

That part in and of itself wouldn't be extremely difficult to just plug and chug, but there are constraints to how I can split up the buyer amounts, and how they can be distributed. A buyer cannot buy from more than 3 sellers, and a seller conversely cannot sell to more than 3 buyers. This means that I can only split the buyer amounts into a maximum of 3 parts, and I can only sum a maximum of 3 of those parts to equal each seller amount. All of these parts must also be integers greater than or equal to zero.

I know this sounds like more of a logic puzzle than an excel question, but if anyone could point me in the right direction for where to start on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Nice setup. I did a run and saw the "Incumbent" and the objective cell reached a stable value of 16 after a few seconds. so I changed the "Maximum Time without Improvement" on the Evolutionary tab from the default setting of 30 seconds to 5 second and got the same result as in the original solution.

Alf

Let's wait for CaptainMorgan286 comments/reaction

I'm sorry to say that first time posters with a solver question is a really bad combination if one except any feedback or comment unless the proposed / uploaded solution don't work. Even if the OP has up to 50 postings perhaps one in four will gives any feedback on a solver problem in my experience.

Alf

Kaper,

Sorry to get back to you so late on this, but I only just got my full actual list of buyers today, and was asking preemptively as this needs a quick turnaround. You and Alf have both had very helpful suggestions and I think I should be able to get to where I need to be with the combination of your suggestion to sort ascending both groups and using a solver for the rest that I cannot match up.

Thanks for both of your help on this!