Linear Programming

Use linear programming to minimize the difference between required and scheduled resources — In workforce management, scheduling refers to finding the “optimal” way to schedule a set of resources depending on the projected demand per interval. This may be, for example, finding how many call center agents to schedule per one-hour interval, given some demand (for instance, using ErlangC) and some restrictions.

Linear programming is a field of mathematical optimization that has been in use since the 1960s. And yet, not many people know what it truly is or how to solve it, because it’s very technical. …

Reflecting on the intersection of three intriguing worlds and a vision for the future. TL/DR: as oil refineries track their environmental footprint, carbon emissions will be part of operational calculations where currently economics and logistics factors largely play the only roles. AI will also help reduce carbon footprints, but the…

After 5 years of collecting change, I had 2 bags full of coins! It was a bunch of quarters (.25¢), dimes (.10¢), and nickels (.05¢). I wanted to make use of them but had no idea how. On a lucky day, on a random shower thought, it dawned on me…

Several personalisation models help customers across the Swiggy app. Outlets shown within various widgets are driven by the restaurant recommendation system. The menu page of each restaurant also uses relevance models to recommend dishes to customers. The next frontier is to personalise the homepage layout itself. In this article, we…

While you may have heard that most computer science problems are solved with Deep Learning techniques nowadays, there are many optimization problems that don’t require too many resources and complex architectures to find optimum (or sub-optimum) solutions. This is the case of Linear Programming problems, in which we need to…

How many products should be produced to maximize my profit? How to create an optimal employee work schedule? How much and which food to consume per day so to be able to meet your diet at minimal cost? If you’re looking for a solution to these questions, you are in…

Problem Statement This is a multi knapsack problem. We have to execute a number of tasks on a fixed number of hosts. Duration of each task and the number hosts on which we want to distribute the tasks is fixed (in this case it is let’s say 3). Individual tasks can not…

Linear programming is not a new concept. But it is very efficient when used. As an engineer, I have encountered many problems that are solved using linear programming like graphs or simple real life problems. What is linear programming (LP)? TL;DR : Optimizing a linear objective function subject to linear constraints as in the figure…