While I could make Ravworks simply search for the most profitable items for you to manufacture, the result will likely be undesirable. For example it will first return any product that currently happens to be overpriced in the market. Secondly it would prefer products with very low market volume, or that are harder to transport, as they often have a higher profit margin. The solution will thus not take into account the required effort, and will be very unstable. For a proper profitability search one has to take all these factors into account.
Instead you should use the Profit Margins tab, where you can maintain a list of items for which you are familiar with its complexities. You can of course also use it to search for new market avenues.
The different modes are used to split your jobs into more reasonable lenghts. If you only build Tech 2 or Tech 3 end products, their respective modes will be activated. Otherwise the default mode is used.
In the Default mode all jobs are split so they do not exceed the maximum length given in your config.
In the Tech 2 and Tech 3 modes, jobs are split to best fill the available slots. Tech 2 mode consists of 4 stages; 2 reaction stages, the component stage, and the end product stage. Tech 3 is similar but has one reaction stage. Each of these stages will try to fully utilize the available slots. Within a stage each slot will only be used once.
The buy price is the same as the highest buy price in Jita. The sell price is the average price of the cheapest 5% available on the market. Prices are typically updated every hour.
To keep things simple, it is assumed that all blueprints for intermediates are at the Maximum Material and Time Efficiency level. Reactions of course cannot be improved.
Many intermediate products are made in batches. The Production Planner takes this into account and ensures you always run a whole number of batches. As a result you will end up with leftover intermediates.
The Profit Margins and Invention tabs assume you can run partial batches, leaving no leftovers. They effectively give the average profit when you build an infinite number of the item.