Your organization may be considering what best single product (offering, alternative, service, etc.) to offer vs. a set of fixed competitors to maximize some goal such as share of preference (share of choice) or profit. In the example below, Sony (Product 4) is trying to optimize its offering with respect to three other fixed competitors (Products 1-3):
Or, your organization may be trying to optimize a product line (more than one product offering) versus a set of competitive offerings.
When optimizing a product line, multiple searched products are specified on separate rows in the product entry grid. In the example below, products 4 and 5 are searched products that are constrained to be Sony. Products 1-3 are fixed competitors.
Let's imagine that Sony's strategy is to appeal to a larger audience of potential buyers by offering both low price and higher price versions. Notice that in addition to restricting the brand names for products 4 and 5 to be Sony, product 4's price is restricted to the range of $300 to $350 in increments of $25. Product 5's price is restricted to the range $375 to $450 in increments of $25. These price restrictions ensure that the two searched products are mutually exclusive and can make the algorithms search more efficiently to find uniquely cohesive products that appeal to different market segments and better fit managerial strategy. This keeps the algorithm from considering two solutions that are in fact identical, but simply switch the order of products 4 and 5.
In the example above, we organized the product offerings (forced their mutual exclusivity) on the dimension of price, but we could have organized the product line on technical capability, size, or another attribute.