Space Probe

Space Probe: The Modern Office Space Optimizer
Team Distribution Visualization
API Documentation

Inspiration

We were inspired by both the wide applicability and complexity of this multivariate optimization problem.

What it does

Our project receives aggregate data from the user in the form of two CSVs representing the structure of a building. These CSVs can be created in Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet editor. Our API calculates the best configuration and returns JSON for the aligned teams.

How we built it

The website is built with React. The frontend communicates with an API server that performs authentication and stores user data. The team assignment algorithm is a C++ program that is controlled by the API server. It uses a heuristic to rank all possible team configurations, guaranteeing the best result.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging approaching the problem due to the large size of the data set. There are more than 16 thousand different team configurations that we had to efficiently rank. Coming up with a heuristic that both maximized employee happiness and minimizes empty space in the building.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to effectively optimize this problem generically so that this software has practical use in the workplace.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate a frontend website with an API server that manages optimization jobs. This project had a lot of moving parts.

What's next for Space Probe

We were only able to analyze our data on a surface level. To compete in a global market, Space Probe needs to offer something unique. We have some ideas for advanced analysis and visualization libraries and tools that we could integrate to improve the user experience.