CBRE Optimization Hack

Inspiration

CBRE is the world’s largest Commercial Real Estate Services company by revenue. A common challenge encountered by the company is helping clients fill office space, given a team’s structure and preferences. while maximizing the amount of space available. We wanted to create an algorithm tailored to the issue at hand.

What it does

We created an interactive UI displaying the results of the algorithm we constructed taking into account office space and team preferences. The UI displays the teams on each floor of the building, as well as the number of people compared to the capacity on the floor. It also shows the overall stats including the number of teams accommodated, the total population, the total capacity, and the occupancy level.

How we built it

The visual component of our project was built using React, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. The algorithm was created with Python.

Challenges we ran into

On the side of algorithm construction, the biggest difficulty was trying to figure out what should be prioritized: the space, the team preferences, etc. Ultimately, we decided to dumb down the problem and approach it that way. We solely prioritized the preferred teams and completely avoided the no-way teams, this way space was optimized while honoring preferences in a more straightforward way. Another issue was handling the data within the algorithm, this was a struggle because we did not want to create obsolete structures that would only be used once. Instead, I had to continuously convert back and forth between different datatypes which was confusing to follow.

On the UI side, we had a hard time with the interactive elements as well as making the site look visually appealing. As we got it working, we were able to build our front-end skills.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an algorithm and creating an interactive UI that went live in 24 hours was no easy feat!!

What we learned

We learned how to create react components and utilize props to create more advanced functions. We got much better at using CSS styling, and became much more comfortable with javascript actions. We also were able to deploy our site through GitHub pages in order to make it accessible.