LinuxConf Europe 2007

Photos and reports

Timetable

Programme

Registration

LPI Exams

Conference Dinner (Sunday)

Duxford Excursion (Monday)

Exhibitors and Sponsors

Accommodation

Venue

Travel

About Cambridge

Kernel Summit 2007

Other GUUG events

Other UKUUG events

Rodrigo Ceron Ferreira de Castro - IBM

TUTORIAL 4 HALF-DAY: Optimizing linear industry problems with the GLPK

"Linear programming is a tool for solving optimization problems. In 1947, George Dantzig developed an efficient method, the simplex algorithm, for solving linear programming problems. Since the development of the simplex algorithm, linear programming has been used to solve optimization problems in industries as diverse as banking, education, forestry, petroleum, and trucking. In a survey of Fortune 500 firms, 85% of the respondents said they had used linear programming." - Wayne L. Winston, Operations Research.

Tools have been developed to solve linear optimization problems. They implement scientific methods described in operations research bibliography. GLPK is one of these tools.

The objective of this tutorial is to provide the audience with an introduction on how to use GLPK to solve linear financial and industry models in Linux: financial planning/decision models, multi-period financial models, multi-period decision models, blending problems, production process models.

The tutorial will cover the following items:

• Brief description of GLPK
• Presenting the GNU MathProg Language through the examples
• How to use glpsol
• Analyzing GLPK results through the examples

Real-world examples to cover the previous topics:

• Set covering problem (from a city-planning example)
• Work-scheduling problem (from a post office example)
• Inventory model (from a sailboat seller example)
• Blending problem (from an oil industry example)
• Production process model (from a cosmetics industry example)

The speaker intends to engage the audience on participating to formulate the problems and writing solutions to them using the GLPK.

Full material with a skeleton of the examples for the participants to fulfill during the tutorial will be provided in both electronic and hard-copy formats.

Some knowledge on formulating optimization problems is advisable but is not required since the speaker will also be covering the problem's formulations.

http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/

Submitted paper

Paper (PDF) and Paper (tgz) .