SupermarketSim is a supermarket simulator that was developed as a university project during my Game and Media Technology Master. The main objective of the simulation is for the user to study multiple product placement techniques, and find the optimal one that can produce the maximum income. This simulation is particularly helpful for inexperienced shop owners or new marketing trainees. By studying various marketing strategies using just a computer simulation, the risk of trying and failing something in real life is almost eliminated. Therefore this could be a great educational tool for them. Moreover, it could be used to study consumer buying behavior patterns in more detail.
In particular, the player is able to place different products on the available shelves, by choosing from the available product categories. Also, a different price category of those products can be selected for each shelf level. In addition, the player can choose whether a product will have a discount, by selecting the discount percentage. Finally, after placing the staff agents inside the supermarket, the player can just choose how many customers to run the simulation with, and press Play. The whole simulation can be watched in real time, or even sped up. Of course, the player can stop the simulation at any time, make the necessary changes, and start again. The simulation ends when all the customers are finished with their shopping. Then, the player can see his/her total income. In addition, the current product placement setup is stored in a log file, which will be used to further analyze and compare with other placement setups that were tested before.