Question

Comment on the most interesting or useful application of linear programming covered in Chapter 4 or one not covered that you think might be useful.

Answer 1

There are many interesting applications of linear programming in many areas be it Engineering, Food and agriculture, Transportation, Machine learning and whatnot.

In today's world where the global pandemic COVID-19 has spread so rapidly, the government of any country can use linear programming in many ways to face this situation. For example, there are various tests that are carried out to check whether a person is infected by the coronavirus or not. Some tests cost higher but take lesser time to give its result whereas other tests take up a long time to give the result ( whether the person is infected or not) but they cost less amount of money. So there is huge confusion about the type of test to be used. Here linear programming can be applied to keep the objective of minimizing the cost as well as time.

Similarly, there are other uses of linear programming in this situation like there are different kinds of treatment that can be given to a patient, some of which cost higher but takes up short time for recovery while others cost lower but take a long time to deal with the recovery. depending on the economic condition and severity of the disease, linear programming can be used to minimize the cost of treatment along with the time of recovery.

Some other useful applications are-

Transportation system relies heavily on linear programming The service industries like Amazon, Flipkart uses optimization for finding the best route for several salesmen travelling to multiple cities from a particular place where their objective is to minimize the transportation cost and time and select the best route possible for each salesman. Such applications are countless.