(Search capabilities are only available for subscriptions that include the Advanced Simulation Module--ASM).
Market simulators represent the best conjoint/choice analysis has to offer in terms of assessing attribute importance and sensitivities, complex interaction or substitution effects, and the likely success of products given certain competitive conditions.
The Advanced Simulation Module (ASM) extends the functionality of the market simulator by enabling automated searches for optimal products based on the criteria of share, revenue, profitability, utility, or cost. This is useful when researchers want to ask "What product is best?" rather than "How good is this product?"
Subject to reasonable caveats about the quality of respondent sampling and questionnaire design, conjoint simulations can accurately assess likely product success long before a product is ready for test market. The ASM can optimize based on utility, purchase likelihood, market share, revenue or profitability; however, profitability optimization requires additional user-provided information about feature costs. If you include feature costs, the ASM can also perform cost minimization searches, to search for products that meet some threshold of utility, share, revenue, or profit while minimizing cost.
When the search space (the number of product combinations to consider) is not overly large, Exhaustive Search examines all possibilities and identifies the optimal solution. When the search space becomes too large for Exhaustive Search to work in a reasonable amount of time, you can use one of two other search techniques provided in the ASM: Grid or Genetic Algorithms.
Often, the business goal is best served by considering tradeoffs among multiple objectives. As an example, one would prefer a solution that near-maximizes revenue while also near-maximizing share of preference, rather than one that maximizes one while performing poorly on the other. The ASM includes multi-objective search capabilities for examining near-optimal tradeoffs among multiple objectives.