Answer to Question #12651 in Quantitative Methods for Paul Bock

Question

I have a set of 600 broken solar cells. Each will be able to produce a fraction of the power from a whole solar cell mostly based on its surface area. So each cell will have a power production value somewhere between .5 and 1.0 of a whole solar cell. I need a way to take this set of values and create optimized subsets of three to six cells so that each subset produces about the same total power. I want to match these subsets as closely as possible with the cells available. As this will maximize the power produced by all the cells in combination.