Mathematical optimisation

2 questions for... (4)
Michel Minoux,
Professor at the IT laboratory of the University of Paris VI.
Rail & Recherche n°23 – April/May/June 2002

Rail & Recherche: Why does the industry have such a passion for designing sophisticated optimisation systems?
Michel Minoux: Globalisation of the economy is now manifested as an almost obsessive search for productivity.
The race to reduce costs has been launched at every level. The administrators or engineers find themselves confronted with problems of optimisation that are often very complex, for which the rule of three or intuition are insufficient. Today there is already a strong demand for advice and expertise in this field and it is going to continue to grow in the years to come.

R & R: Which techniques have made the most progress?
M. M.: It is no doubt the methods known as “exact” which have recently made the most considerable progress.
This has opened up the way for the effective resolution of industrial applications considered as practically unmanageable just five or ten years ago, be it for air transport, in production scheduling or in telecommunications. These results were obtained thanks to the notable progress in mathematical and algorithmic techniques, such as generalised linear programming, cutting-plane and polyhedral combination techniques. In all these fields one can expect substantial progress from academic research, likely to have an immediate effect on industrialists in terms of gains in productivity.