Autobytel, Inc. – Irvine, CA
A B2C vehicle research and sales portal.
- Designed and developed a J2EE-based vehicle configurator – a system that allows users to pick and choose vehicle options while enforcing manufacturers’ rules constraining those choices. The system is similar in concept to a chess-playing program in that it solves extremely complex logic paths while trying to optimize for the best solution (in this case, the lowest cost). The algorithm is founded on a constraint-based optimization rule engine (designed by me), and is several orders of magnitude faster than the existing system. The configurator system was deployed as an XML / SOAP based web service.
- The configurator is a key element of www.autobytel.com. This site experiences very high traffic volumes. As a result, the configurator system was designed to scale well across many machines in Autobytel’s server farm. This problem is especially difficult because vehicle configuration is a computationally intense problem.
- Managed the development staff for the configurator project.
- Created appropriate documentation for the configurator, including UML diagrams, XML schemas, technical specification documents, and more.