Working in vehicle routing optimization for MSB, I would like to share a couple of insights/observations.
1. People can be very creative in solving their problems with your features (and bugs!), even completely unrelated at first thought. They just have to be (a) observable, (b) speaking the language your users understand, which mathematically oriented or generic packages do not.
2. On the other hand, the quite plausible (to me) approach of "obtain an initial solution — adjust for ad-hoc constraints — reoptimize the rest" constantly fails as "too complex" with users reverting to Excel instead.
However, I still stubbornly believe that mathematical optimization cannot do everything, and we should aim for domain-specific decision-support systems that are primarily manual where optimization is only a part of solution building, and UX really matters in that process.
1. People can be very creative in solving their problems with your features (and bugs!), even completely unrelated at first thought. They just have to be (a) observable, (b) speaking the language your users understand, which mathematically oriented or generic packages do not.
2. On the other hand, the quite plausible (to me) approach of "obtain an initial solution — adjust for ad-hoc constraints — reoptimize the rest" constantly fails as "too complex" with users reverting to Excel instead.
However, I still stubbornly believe that mathematical optimization cannot do everything, and we should aim for domain-specific decision-support systems that are primarily manual where optimization is only a part of solution building, and UX really matters in that process.