Following are lightly edited questions and answers from Patricia’s presentation on Orchestrating Optimization with Precision Agents at the INFORMS Analytics+ conference and in a subsequent webinar (watch the recording here and see Patricia’s previous blog post for reference.) Question: What is the difference between an agent and a tool? Patricia: The agent is the decision […]
This post is based on Patricia’s presentation at the INFORMS Analytics+ Conference and in a subsequent webinar (watch the recording here). For decades, enterprise optimization systems have been built around a familiar assumption: if you can centralize enough data, encode enough constraints, and build a sufficiently sophisticated model, you can produce better operational decisions. That […]
This follows the previous post on Agile v. Waterfall in Optimization Solution Development. Why don’t all optimization practitioners use Agile? What’s the catch? Let’s consider the challenges and how to overcome them. Decomposing the Model For traditional software development projects like creating a website, Agile is straightforward: you might one week build a new form, […]
Following is the first of two lightly edited excerpts from Patricia’s recent presentation at the Gurobi Decision Intelligence Summit in Las Vegas. In most corporate IT departments you see Agile everywhere, but many of us remember when that was not the case. Agile Software Development began, or at least coalesced, in 2001 at a meeting […]
Leaders of a software platform for structured finance sought assistance in significantly upgrading its optimization features. An important component of the technology portfolio of a global financial analytics provider, the platform is used by issuers, investors, underwriters and other entities to administer, monitor and value collections of securities. Improving the Proof of Concept Initially, the […]
At an e-commerce giant, customer orders are assigned throughout the day to fulfillment centers and third parties across the United States while minimizing shipment costs, observing limits on inventory, reducing split orders, and balancing workload across the fulfillment centers. The company’s data science team created an order fulfillment optimization proof of concept in Python that […]
We define optimizing simulation as the application of optimization principles to simulation, taking it from predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics. Optimization is layered on top of inputs and a simulation to determine optimal policies, decisions, and even operating parameters based on key KPIs. This allows us to simulate environments, facilities, and different decisions that people […]
In the electric utility industry, an Independent System Operator (ISO) coordinates and directs the flow of electricity over a region’s high-voltage transmission system. Like an air traffic controller, an ISO oversees the daily operation of the power grid. For several decades, mathematical optimization models have assisted critical decision-making about key assets that increase the efficiency […]
