What is optimization and how it can help you do more with less ? Zoo, buses, kids and optimization.
Best wishes for 2018
NB: A second version at https://medium.com/@alexfleischer_84755/optimization-simply-do-more-with-less-zoo-buses-and-kids-66940178db6
Last month I enjoyed a nice post by Virginie
Holidays are over. Gifts are behind. Kids are back to school. So let me give my own perspective.
What is optimization and how it can help you do more with less ? Let me try to find another way to answer that question. Not for grownups but for kids.
Let me describe a problem my mathematics teacher gave us when I was 14!
300 kids need to travel to the London zoo.The school may rent 40 seats and 30 seats buses for 500 and 400 ￡. How many buses of each to minimize cost ?
What I did back then was write a loop in Pascal and got the answer 6 40 seats buses and 2 30 seats buses. The teacher was not that happy because she wanted us to find this solution by drawing parallel lines.
I was not happy with her answer because what if you had 5 kind of buses!
CPLEX and Mathematical optimization tackle this kind of problems but with many more decision variables.
(number of buses are called decision variables)
And with CPLEX you have many different ways to model and solve the tiny example I mentioned, and many paths to benefit from optimization.
PS: Not only in English but in 22 other languages - Arabic, Catalan, Chinese,Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek,Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese
A second version at https://medium.com/@alexfleischer_84755/optimization-simply-do-more-with-less-zoo-buses-and-kids-66940178db6
Senior operations research and data scientist
5 年Hi Alex, I like the simple optimization example about the bus/zoo/kids. I will use it for a presentation about applied mathematics that I will voluntarily give for kids at my daughter's secondary school (14 to 15 years old). Merci beaucoup pour le partage.
Digital Innovator | Transforming Businesses by Leveraging Technology
5 年The Session attached to this was brilliant as well. Love it
Ph.D. Student in Operational Research & Management Science
6 年Thanks Alex, It's a very interesting example.?
Alex Fleischer, great material! As usual. Thanks to share a ppt. Andrey