Optimization is classically used to make the most profitable choices in multiple decision types for vehicles and machinery, including: assignment, production/acquisition, scheduling, network routing, pricing, and policy creation.

In optimization applications, these decisions about Land and Facilities are usually governed by multiple overlapping sets of rules and costs.  These rules represent both challenges and opportunities.  The challenges are to find the best solutions that follow all of the rules.  The opportunities are to try different combinations in different circumstances that follow the rules and maximize the formal objective function, which is typically greatest asset utilization and minimum overtime and transportation costs--and therefore maximum profit.

At Princeton Consultants, we group these rules/costs into: physical, regulatory, contractual, marketplace, policy, and practical.

• Physical: train capacity for the freight railroad terminals; distance from the fields to the mills for the regional agribusiness
• Regulatory: landing rules for the airline by country and by airport
• Contractual: union work rules for the service network company
• Marketplace: demand varies by time of year and crop varietal for the regional agribusiness
• Policy: crop rotation by field for the regional agribusiness
• Practical: congestion avoidance based on time of day for the freight railroad’s discretionary movements