Tutorial How Make Better Decisions Using Optimization.

Tutorial: Optimization for Better Decisions 

Every day, in business, government, and even our personal lives, we make decisions about how to best use the resources – such as time and money – available to us.  It is challenging enough to decide which items to buy with our available funds, or which of several priorities we should tackle this morning, individually.  But for even medium-size organizations, this challenge is multiplied many times over:  How to best schedule every hour for a staff of 30 people in a call center?  How to load packages on a fleet of 100 tracks, and which routes they should drive to make deliveries in the least time?  How to assign crews and aircraft to 1,000 airline flights, as they move across the country throughout a day? 

These decisions – how to allocate (usually limited) resources to different uses, when there are so many options, with so many inter-relationships – are prime candidates for optimization.  At leading firms, all of the foregoing decisions are routinely made with the aid of optimization.  To use optimization, we need to define, in quantitative terms, a model that specifies all the ways, times or places our resources may be allocated, and all the significant constraints on resources and uses that must be met.  Then a solver searches for and finds the best resource allocation decisions

If you followed this tutorial to its conclusion, you will know a lot more than most people about optimization!  While this tutorial illustrates these concepts with Excel models and simple plots, the ideas of linearity and convexity are fundamental, and applicable to any kind of optimization problem, solution algorithm, or software.  Hopefully, you will also realize how optimization problems can become very difficult to solve, but how powerful software is available to help you find good solutions, even for the most challenging problems.