In the first decade of my career, most optimization models that I authored also required one or more scripts. They were necessary to automate tasks such as importing data, setting parameters, solving the model, executing another program (e.g., to crunch ...
Last spring in Portland, Oregon, the two primary container shipping companies with regularly scheduled service abruptly stopped calling, partly due to a longshoreman strike at the time. The impact was fast; the fallout substantial. Whereas containers ...
About a decade ago, I would occasionally watch the TV show Good Eats. I’m not a chef; I’m not even much of a cook. I can still burn microwaved popcorn. Truth is, I just enjoyed the science aspect of the show. You might be asking “What does a food show ...
This is the second of a two-part series on stochastic optimization, defined in Wikipedia as “optimization methods that generate and use random variables. For stochastic problems, the random variables appear in the formulation of the optimization problem ...
Every company operates within a large set of constraints, including annual budgets, material purchase contracts, resource capacity, hospital ward space, environmental regulations, customer order contracts, financial reporting regulations, and others. ...
The history of optimization modeling goes back to the middle of the last century. This important field of science plays a major role in industry, commerce, engineering and space exploration.
“If I had only known back in school what I know today!”
For the next few seconds, think paper – any type, any use, for anything. Think of all the paper products you use. (If you are drawing a blank, consider: newsprint, brown bags, tissue, napkins, towels, books, magazines, phone directories, photocopy and ...
Integer variables are often required to model reality – a fact well understood for the last 50 years. Still, five decades of advancement has resulted in few distinct mixed integer (MIP) modeling approaches. As if most software vendors simply copied each ...