Operations Research Decoded: When simplex is complex…

Suppose there are a few wholesalers and retailers each having fixed stock and demand respectively. The trick for the wholesaler is to apportion stock so that it meets demand, has the minimum unit cost of freight and he has no stock left.

Sounds simple, huh? You may think we will be bothered with more such real world problems that entail a little math. No. We are just doing math all the time. Sensitivity analysis, graphs, matrices and its stupid row operations with all those zj,cj and what else. They even dare call it simplex! No person in the right mind will remember anything the day after the exam.

The mere subject name suggests it’s not for managers and only for researchers. Why trouble us with nitty-gritty when all you have to tell us is what sorts of problems have solutions in linear programming?