Challenge Dec-2025 “Inside/Outside Production”

Posted on November 27, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

You need to help a manufacturer decide how much of each demanded product should be produced internally and how much should be sourced from outside. Whether a product is made inside or outside, it has an associated cost. A product can consume a given amount of internal resources that have limited capacities. The general objective is to minimize the total production cost while ensuring the company meets the demand exactly or with a certain tolerance.

The manufacturer wants to consider various production decisions to choose the most suitable ones based on the long-term resource availability and uncertain future demand. Link

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One More Time About Declarativity

Posted on November 23, 2025 by jacobfeldman

Link

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The person who ships wins

Posted on November 18, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Adam DeJans Jr. recommends:

– Build the smallest thing that actually solves the problem
– Get it in front of people fast
– Fix what actually matters, not what only you notice
– Don’t wait for perfect alignment; ship something that forces alignment
– Make progress visible

This applies to optimization models, ML systems, pricing engines, routing algorithms, everything. The polished version only exists because the messy version went out first. Link

Posted in Decision Modeling, Software Development | Leave a comment

Yann LeCun is leaving Meta

Posted on November 17, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

“Yann LeCun is leaving Meta. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.
One of the founding fathers of modern AI is quietly preparing his next move.
And the reason he is leaving might reshape the entire industry.” Link More

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Scientists | Leave a comment

Challenge Nov-2025 “Advanced Website Design”

Posted on November 15, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

This challenge is an advanced version of last month’s Challenge Oct-2025, when a freelance developer needs to design a website with as many features as possible, but also maximizing the total value of the selected features. Now you have several additional requirements:

  • Features 3 and 4 can be chosen only together.
  • Feature 2 cannot be combined with Feature 3.
  • Only one of the features 8, 9, and 10 can be selected. Otherwise, the cost of each of these features will be increased by 10%.
  • If 5 or more features are selected, 5% discount is provided.

You want to offer a design that maximizes the total value while minimizing the total cost. Link

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“It’s the autonomy, stupid!”

Posted on November 14, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

This is the title of Yefim Natis‘s post about agentic computing. “Agents can be the building blocks for composable solutions, and orchestration agents may take on the role of a composer. Autonomy of a software component is not new. The best architectures for complex enterprise systems are compositions of autonomous components, typically interconnected via asynchronous messaging and event-driven communications. Event listeners (sinks) are always autonomous as they are designed to operate in the “mission-impossible” style: without the ability to negotiate with the source. An autonomous component must ensure its internal integrity independent of external events and contexts. Autonomy does not mean that the component does not connect out; it means that it will operate with full integrity regardless of the outcomes of its external connections.

Autonomy’s value does not require the use of AI. Autonomous modularity is the typical choice for complex systems that demand performance at the enterprise/global scale. The organizations that are hesitant to invest in the current AI tools for their mission-critical systems should not delay the architectural transformation to agentic computing. Autonomous modularity and the principles of composable architecture will serve you well in improving your current systems, and will turn out to be a great foundation for the future enterprise-AI computing.” Link

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IBM OPL CPLEX – Free Community Edition

Posted on November 13, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

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”

Posted on November 13, 2025 by jacobfeldman

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

Posted on November 12, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

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

Posted on November 11, 2025 by decisionmanagementcommunity

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

Posted in Optimization | Leave a comment