IBM OPL CPLEX – Free Community Edition

Did you know that IBM provides a FREE ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio for individual users? You can register to download it using the link. The no-cost edition is restricted to problems up to 1,000 variables and 1,000 constraints. Flexibility to build models using Optimization Programming Language (OPL) and C, C++, Java, C#, and Python APIs. Link

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Solutions for Oct-2025 Challenge “Decision with two objectives”

DMCommunity.org has already received five solutions for its Oct-2025 Challenge, which asks to help a web designer to select certain website features while satisfying budget and value constraints. What makes this simple problem interesting is that it involves two conflicting objectives: total value and total cost. Potential solutions are supposed to devise a rational way to trade them against each other.

The provided solutions were created using the following tools: Seeker, Pymoo, OPL CPLEX, Copilot, and OpenRules. I decided to add one more solution based on http://RuleSolver.com. This post https://lnkd.in/eYdJAHEE briefly analyzes all six solutions.

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Never Ignore Uncertainty

Several important points made by Dr. Meinolf Sellmann:

  • We have to do better than saying, “Make your best forecast, and then we plan for that.” This is a bit hard to grasp at first, but the issue is that plans that are optimal for a specific future are frequently a disaster for futures that deviate only slightly.
  • This is the real reason why optimization has such a hard time in supply chain planning and why its impact is so very limited in practice. Because it assumes that forecasts were 100% accurate, and that is simply not the case.
  • Is there a holy grail? No. It will always be hard to run your business in the face of uncertainty that cannot be magically predicted or defined away. But there is a way for you to run your business and your operations in a data-driven fashion that will give you an edge over your competition.
  • Create a model that allows you to optimize your decisions so that the suggestions from the solver will work efficiently and resiliently for a big probability mass of futures and not just the point-predicted future. Link

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Where business meets math

Adam DeJans Jr. just posted an interesting comment: “My favorite optimization problems are the ones everyone assumes are already solved. The ones that SOUND simple but never really are. That’s where the real fun begins. I love working in the middle of the bell curve, where business meets math and every “obvious” solution hides a dozen tradeoffs waiting to be uncovered. That’s where optimization shines, making the invisible complexity visible, and turning it into measurable impact.” Link

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Maximizing Minimum Profit while Minimizing Maximum Regret

Dr. Meinolf Sellman shared a decision problem that deals with planning crop growth without knowing the weather. His solution is based on the proprietary multi-objective optimization that helps to find a rational compromise between maximizing the minimum profit and minimizing the maximum regret. Meinolf presented a related approach during his DecisionCAMP-2025 presentation. Link

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Separating thinking from doing

Vincent Lextrait’s reaction to “vibe coding”: This is coming from the illusion that software is like manufacturing, separating thinking from doing. It is completely missing the point that software developers are not blue collar workers executing somebody else’s vision. They are actually thinking more, asking questions and filling the gaps with intelligence and ingenuity. As Steve Jobs captured it perfectly in 1995:The doers are the major thinkers.” Exactly 30 years after, most people are still struggling with that idea. It’s sad. Software abstraction is the only source of progress. But since the eCommerce talent shock around 2000, people want cannon fodder programmers. Replacing or augmenting these with natural language is just one more stupid iteration. See Edsger W.Dijkstra

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Cognitive AI vs Statistical AI

Peter Voss was our presenter at DecisionCAMP-2025 in September. You may watch his presentation. Read his latest article, “Why Cognitive AI, and not LLMs, will get us to AGI”. Link

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IDC: “Accelerating enterprise decision intelligence with AI agents”

Here is a link to the white paper, published by IDC in Nov-2025: “Decision intelligence allows enterprises to leverage continuous and intelligent decision cycles, where information flows seamlessly from data collection to execution and feedback. In essence, it is a set of competencies that fully or partially automates all aspects of the decision-making process, resulting in improved decision consistency and speed. The study provided the participants (representing business and IT decision-makers from 311 large organizations across 11 countries and six industries) with clarification that decision intelligence includes the six competencies shown below.” Link

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Forrester 2026 Predictions

The time to fill developer positions will double: (Link)

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MIT Report “State of AI in Business 2025”

July-2025

LINK

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