A Boeing problem involves designing an almost invisible part of an airplane to have less drag. They estimate that .1% improvement would save $60,000,000 in fuel for each airplane over its life. But, the client group would be quite happy with a tool that did no better than they can do now, but did it faster. This part has to be redesigned with every tweak of the airplane design. Time is money.

Airlines have built OR groups to schedule crews & planes.

Boeing has a large OR group and a sizable group building high level design tools. Both are busy and growing. The design tools group I work with is swamped with requests for help from manufacturing groups.

Optimization has reached the point in commerce where there are companies making silly claims about solving all the client’s optimization problems.

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