In this semester 2 we received a task for the course decision mathematics

from the mathematics department of IPG Kampus Raja Melewar. The task is about

the topic linear programming.

By doing this assignment I can discover some importance of linear

programming. I learn that linear programming is very important in various fields of life

especially in managerial decision making. The reason is that it helps the company in

minimizing the costs and maximizing the profits. Through linear programming

managers can calculate the prices and the sales units which can maximize the

profits of the company. Therefore, there are various issues which the company

incurs regarding their costs and prices therefore, tools like linear programming can

help the managers in decision making progress.

Mathematical modelling technique useful for guiding quantitative decisions in

business, industrial engineering, and to a lesser extent the social and physical

sciences. Solving a linear programming problem can be reduced to finding the

optimum value (see optimization) of a linear equation (called an objective function),

subject to a set of constraints expressed as inequalities. The number of inequalities

and variables depends on the complexity of the problem, whose solution is found by

solving the system of inequalities like a system of equations. The extensive use of

linear programming during World War II to deal with transportation, scheduling and

allocations of resources under constraints like cost and priority gave the subject an

impetus that carried it into the postwar era. The number of equations and variables

needed to model real-life situations accurately is large, and the solution process can

be time-consuming even with computers.

 Linear programming is the name of a branch of applied mathematics that

deals with solving optimization problem of a particular form. Linear programming

problems consist of a linear cost function (consisting of a certain number of

variables) which is to be minimized or maximized subject to a certain number of

constraints. The constraints are linear inequalities of the variables used in the cost

function. The cost function is also sometimes called the objective function. Linear

programming is closely related to linear algebra. The most noticeable difference is

that linear programming often uses inequalities in the problem statement rather than

equalities.

Then a linear Programming model seeks to maximize or minimize a linear

function, subject to a set of linear constraints. The linear model consists of the

following components that are set of decision variables, an objective function, and a

set of constraints. Many real static problems lend themselves to linear programming

formulations. Many real problems can be approximated by linear models. The output

generated by linear programs provides useful “what’s best” and “what-if” information.

When management is seeking a production schedule that will increase the

company’s profit. A linear programming model can provide an insight and an

intelligent solution to this problem.

Linear programming is as tool of planning is superior to IOA which is

Information Organization and Access, consists of a content preparation process and

a content search and access process. In IOA only one method is adopted to produce

a commodity. It does not take into consideration the bottlenecks which a

development project has to face. But in linear programming a definite objective is set

to maximize income or minimize costs. All possible techniques or process are taken

into account for achieving the desired objective. This makes possible the substitution
of one factor for the other till most efficient and economic process is attained. The

planning agencies are faced with such constraints as the lack of sufficient funds,

capital, machinery and growing population. Linear programming takes them into

account and helps in evolving an optimum plan for attain the objectives within a

specified period of time. Thus linear programming technique is helpful in constructing

the theoretical multi-sector planning models. Such models extend the consistency

models of input output type to optimization of income or employment or any other

quantifiable plan objective under the constraints of limited resources and

technological conditions of production. Practically linear programming is being used

in involving a limited number of economic problems .

Furthermore, linear programming is a mathematical method for determining a

way to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a given

mathematical model for some list of requirements represented as linear equations.

More formally, linear programming is a technique for the optimization of a linear

objective function, subject to linear equality and linear inequality constraints.

Linear programming can be applied to various fields of study. It is used most

extensively in business and economics, but can also be utilized for some

engineering problems. Industries that use linear programming models include

transportation, energy, telecommunications, and manufacturing. It has proved useful

in modeling diverse types of problems in planning, routing, scheduling, assignment,

and design.

When I do this assignment I have searched for many information and

examples of questions in internet. This helps to get to know about the history of

linear programming. The problem of solving a system of linear inequalities dates

back at least as far as Fourier, after whom the method of Fourier-Motzkin elimination

is named. Linear programming arose as a mathematical model developed during

World War II to plan expenditures and returns in order to reduce costs to the army

and increase losses to the enemy. It was kept secret until 1947. Postwar, many

industries found its use in their daily planning.

The founders of the subject are Leonid Kantorovich, a Russian mathematician

who developed linear programming problems in 1939, George B. Dantzig, who

published the simplex method in 1947, and John von Neumann, who developed the

theory of the duality in the same year. The linear programming problem was first

shown to be solvable in polynomial time by Leonid Khachiyan in 1979, but a larger

theoretical and practical breakthrough in the field came in 1984 when Narendra

Karmarkar introduced a new interior point method for solving linear programming

problems.

Dantzig's original example of finding the best assignment of 70 people to 70

jobs exemplifies the usefulness of linear programming. The computing power

required to test all the permutations to select the best assignment is vast; the

number of possible configurations exceeds the number of particles in the universe.

However, it takes only a moment to find the optimum solution by posing the problem

as a linear program and applying the Simplex algorithm. The theory behind linear

programming drastically reduces the number of possible optimal solutions that must

be checked.

Then, Linear programming is a considerable field of optimization for several

reasons. Many practical problems in operations research can be expressed as linear

programming problems. Certain special cases of linear programming, such as

network flow problems and multi commodity flow problems are considered important

enough to have generated much research on specialized algorithms for their

solution. A number of algorithms for other types of optimization problems work by

solving LP problems as sub-problems. Historically, ideas from linear programming

have inspired many of the central concepts of optimization theory, such as duality,

decomposition, and the importance of convexity and its generalizations. Likewise,

linear programming is heavily used in microeconomics and company management,

such as planning, production, transportation, technology and other issues. Although

the modern management issues are ever-changing, most companies would like to

maximize profits or minimize costs with limited resources. Therefore, many issues

can be characterized as linear programming problems.

A linear program is infeasible if there exists no solution that satisfies all of the

constraints -- in other words, if no feasible solution can be constructed. Since any

real operation that are modeling must remain within the constraints of reality,

infeasibility most often indicates an error of some kind. Upon detecting infeasibility,

LP codes typically show you the most recent infeasible solution that they have

encountered. Sometimes this solution provides a good clue as to the source of

infeasibility. If it fails to satisfy certain capacity constraints, for example, then you

would do well to check whether the capacity is sufficient to meet the demand;

perhaps a demand number has been mistyped, or an incorrect expression for the

capacity has been used in the capacity constraint, or the model simply lacks any

provision for coping with increasing demands. More often, unfortunately, LP codes

respond to an infeasible problem by returning a meaninglessly infeasible

solutionsuch as one that violates material balances.

 Any vector x satisfying the constraints of the linear programming problem is

called a feasible solution of the problem. Every linear programming problem falls into

one of three categories which are infeasible, Unbounded and has an optimal

solution. A liar programming problem is infeasible if a feasible solution to the problem

does not exist where there is no vector x for which all the constraints of the problem

are satisfied. Then unbounded is the condition where the constraints do not

sufficiently restrain the cost function so that for any given feasible solution, another

feasible solution can be found that makes a further improvement to the cost function.

The third condition which has an optimal solution is linear programming problems

that are not infeasible or unbounded have an optimal solution; that is the cost

function has a unique minimum (or maximum) cost function value. This does not

mean that values of the variables that yield that optimal solution are unique.

Linear programming is an important branch of applied mathematics that solve

a wide variety of optimization problems. It is widely in production planning and

scheduling problems. Many recent advances in the field have come from the airline

industry where aircraft and crew scheduling have been great improved by the use of

linear programming. It has also been used to solve a variety of assignment

problems. Although the revised method is not theoretically satisfactory from a

computational point of view, it is by far the most widely used method to solve linear

programming problems and only rarely are its limitations encountered in practical

applications. The biggest advantage of linear programming as an optimization

method is that it always achieves the optimal solution of one exists.

Than as I do the second task I learned so many things about critical path

analysis. Operational researchers developed a method of scheduling complex

projects shortly after the second world war. It is sometimes called network analysis,

but is more usually known as critical path analysis.

I learned that the essential technique for using critical path analysis is to

construct a model of the project that includes the following a list of all activities

required to complete the project (typically categorized within a work breakdown

structure), the time (duration) that each activity will take to completion, and the

dependencies between the activities.

Then I understood that using these values, critical path analysis calculates the

longest path of planned activities to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest

that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer. This process

determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have

"total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project

management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add

up to the longest overall duration. This determines the shortest time possible to

complete the project. Any delay of an activity on the critical path directly impacts the

planned project completion date (i.e. there is no float on the critical path). A project

can have several, parallel, near critical paths. An additional parallel path through the

network with the total durations shorter than the critical path is called a sub-critical or

non-critical path.

So, these results allow managers to prioritize activities for the effective

management of project completion, and to shorten the planned critical path of a

project by pruning critical path activities, by "fast tracking" (i.e., performing more

activities in parallel), and/or by "crashing the critical path" (i.e., shortening the

durations of critical path activities by adding resources).

 I find out that originally, the critical path method considered only logical

dependencies between terminal elements. Since then, it has been expanded to allow

for the inclusion of resources related to each activity, through processes called

activity-based resource assignments and resource levelling. A resource-levelled

schedule may include delays due to resource bottlenecks (i.e., unavailability of a

resource at the required time), and may cause a previously shorter path to become

the longest or most "resource critical" path. A related concept is called the critical

chain, which attempts to protect activity and project durations from unforeseen

delays due to resource constraints.

Other than that from the examples that I have seen for the critical path

analysis, since project schedules change on a regular basis, critical path anlysis

allows continuous monitoring of the schedule, allows the project manager to track

the critical activities, and alerts the project manager to the possibility that non-critical

activities may be delayed beyond their total float, thus creating a new critical path

and delaying project completion. In addition, the method can easily incorporate the

concepts of stochastic predictions, using the Program Evaluation and Review

Technique (PERT) and event chain methodology.

Than from the information that I read from the internet, I also found that

currently, there are several software solutions available in industry that use the

critical path analysis method of scheduling, see list of project management software.

Ironically, the method currently used by most project management software is

actually based on a manual calculation approach developed by Fondahl of Stanford

University.
 I learned that a schedule generated using critical path techniques often is not

realised precisely, as estimations are used to calculate times: if one mistake is

made, the results of the analysis may change. This could cause an upset in the

implementation of a project if the estimates are blindly believed, and if changes are

not addressed promptly. However, the structure of critical path analysis is such that

the variance from the original schedule caused by any change can be measured,

and its impact either ameliorated or adjusted for. Indeed, an important element of

project post-mortem analysis is the As Built Critical Path (ABCP), which analyzes the

specific causes and impacts of changes between the planned schedule and eventual

schedule as actually implemented.

I also had understood that critical Path Analysis is an effective and powerful

method of assessing what tasks must be carried out, where parallel activity can be

performed, the shortest time in which you can complete a project, resources needed

to execute a project, the sequence of activities, scheduling and timings involved, task

priorities and the most efficient way of shortening time on urgent projects.

An effective Critical Path Analysis can make the difference between success

and failure on complex projects. It can be very useful for assessing the importance of

problems faced during the implementation of the plan. Critical path analysis provides

the following benefits that it provides a graphical view of the project, predicts the time

required to complete the project, and it also shows which activities are critical to

maintaining the schedule and which are not.

Critical path analysis models the activities and events of a project as a

network. Activities are depicted as nodes on the network and events that signify the

beginning or ending of activities are depicted as arcs or lines between the nodes.
 I were able to identify that the main function of critical path analysis is the

technique uses several factors regarding task completion time and task dependency

to calculate the longest amount of time (or path) it will take to complete the project.

Critical path analysis also helps the project manager determine when work on tasks

related to the project needs to begin in order to achieve the calculated completion

time, and when each task in the project needs to be initiated. Tasks that directly

affect the completion date are considered "critical," as it is imperative they finish on

time and not throw off the entire schedule.

After completing this task I also able to identify important matters that need to

be considered. Critical path schedules are not generated with specific dates in mind,

but according to an amount of time. Tasks are not analyzed to be due by a certain

date, but to take a certain number of days or months to complete. Not being bound

to a specific completion date allows a project manager to calculate the critical path of

a project and then insert it, move it or alter it on her schedule with ease.

Critical path method, is an important method of planning for companies that

produce a product. This method allows a company to maximize it's resources. Those

resources include both raw materials and human resources. When using the critical

path scheduling method, a company can determine shipping schedules for supplies

to limit the shipping cost by eliminating express shipping of raw materials to the

business if they can be received via a standard shipping method by using critical

path scheduling planning.

Then I understand that the critical path scheduling method of production is a

procedure that is used by companies to maximize their resources. It is especially

useful for manufacturing companies. It identifies the steps that are needed to be
completed before others can be started in the manufacturing process. It also

estimates the amount of time needed for each step. After the critical path diagram is

completed, a company can look at it and decide how long is the longest it will need

to produce a product.

Then I learned that, creating a critical path method diagram can help a

company be more organized. When creating the diagram, the company needs to

break down an entire manufacturing process into steps. For each step, it needs to

define three items. The first is the raw materials needed and if they will be produced

by a previous step. The next is the earliest that step can be started so it is completed

at the precise time the product produced by that step is needed for another step. The

final analysis is determining what processes are reliant on the product this step will

produce. Each step might produce a completed product to be used in the larger

process of completing a finished product, or it can produce a partially completed

piece that another step will complete.

Finally it can be concluded that critical path analysis method is playing an

important role in various important field that makes it essential in human life.