Assignment: Basic Concepts of Algorithms

The summary assignments from each week (except the first week) build upon the work and knowledge that you developed in previous weeks. So, keep your scenario in mind.

You will select an organization for which you will complete each of the assigned tasks. The organization can be real or fictitious, but the work that you complete needs to apply to the scenarios that are provided.

Your company is facing two new requirements for an existing application. The application manages customers and products, and it is been working fine for several years. Recently, the marketing department has requested the following improvements to the information technology (IT) department:

• They want to be able to search for a specific product using the best search algorithm.
• They want to be able to print a sorted list for all of the customers, using the last name as a key.

You have been assigned this project by your manager. Your company is not using databases to store the information for customer or products, so you will have to help it decide which algorithm to use when sorting a list of elements or searching for an element.

The existing information for customers is as follows:

• First name
• Last name
• Shipping address
• Billing address
• Phone number
• Customer ID

The information for the product is as follows:

• Product ID
• Name
• Description
• Wholesale price
• Sale price
• Inventory

You will create a Word document to do following tasks:

• Describe your scenario company.

• Based on the product and customer data explained in this document, provide at least 2 different types of data structures for the customers and the products. Remember that the data structure selection can have an impact in the performance achieved by the algorithm. Try to follow the information provided in class and the material in the course to make an informed selection.

• Evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of each data structure.

• Recommend 1 option, knowing that the operations that are going to be performed on the customers are sorting using different keys, and the operation that is going to be performed on the product data is mostly searching.