I'm building a market manager for EVE, but this problem should be solvable without any prior knowledge of the game. Basically, sell orders in EVE look like this:
All I'm really concerned with is picking a good price. The numbers the program would pick are sent out to our production team so they can buy the items to build things. Just like in a real market, the numbers we send off need to reflect the cheapest price that still offers a good quantity. Also, available quantities change over time, so we can't just pick the lowest listed price.
For example, in the screencap above, we would set the sell price between 2,800.00 ISK and 3,000.00 ISK, even if only 500 units were needed. Even though the cheapest order would fit the quantity, it would probably quickly disappear. It would be better to set the price a tad higher so we don't underpay the production people.
The Question:
It's easy enough to figure prices out just by looking at the data, but I can't figure out how to have a program [java] do it. Different items sell with much less or more quantities (i.e. 3 or 300 or 3000 items) so the program has to be able to modify itself based on the offerings.
I don't really want code as much as I do a way to think this through.
Thanks in advance.