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History
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Definitions
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Finding Maxima and Minima
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Examples
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Functions of more variables
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Applications
What is Optimization?
Optimization is a mathematical discipline thatconcerns the finding of minima and maxima of functions, subjectto so-called constraints. Since then, his "linear programming"techniques and their descendents were applied to a wide varietyof problems, from the scheduling of production facilities, to yieldmanagement in airlines. Today, optimization comprises a widevariety of techniques from Operations Research, artificialintelligence and computer science, and is used to improvebusiness processes in practically all industries.Discrete optimization problems arise, when the variablesoccurring in the optimization function can take only a finitenumber of discrete values. For example, the staff scheduler of ahospital unit has a finite set of staff members available, and thusstaff scheduling consists of taking discrete decisions, one for eachslot of the resulting schedule. Discrete optimization aims at taking
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