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 and speed of execution while maintaining ease of use.

The presentation continues by taking 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 Python, C++, C#, Java, MATLAB, 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. Several case studies of AMPL applications round out the presentation by showing how model-based optimization has been successful in varied areas of analytics practice.