Speaker: Robert Fourer, AMPL Optimization Inc.

Optimization is the most widely adopted technology of Prescriptive Analytics, but also the most challenging to implement:

• How can you prototype an optimization application fast enough to get results before the problem owner loses interest?
• How can you develop optimization-based procedures to get results you can use, within your time and resource requirements?
• How can you integrate optimization into your enterprise’s decision-making systems?

In this presentation, we show how AMPL gets you going without elaborate training, extra programmers, or premature commitments. We start by introducing model-based optimization, the key approach to streamlining the optimization modeling cycle and building successful applications today. Then we demonstrate how AMPL’s design of a language and system for model-based optimization is able to offer exceptional power of expression while maintaining ease of use.

The remainder of the presentation takes a single example through successive stages of the optimization modeling lifecycle:

• Prototyping in an interactive command environment.
• Development of optimization procedures via AMPL’s built-in scripting language.
• Integration through APIs to widely used programming languages, including C++, C#, Java, and MATLAB, and featuring the popular data science languages Python and R.

Our example is simple enough for participants to follow its development through the course of this short workshop, yet rich enough to serve as a foundation for appreciating model-based optimization in practice.