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Linear programming is often a favorite topic for both professors and students. The ability to introduce LP using a graphical approach, the relative ease of the solution method, the widespread availability of LP software packages, and the wide range of applications make LP accessible even to students with relatively weak mathematical backgrounds. Additionally, LP provides an excellent opportunity to introduce the idea of “what-if” analysis, due to the powerful tools for post-optimality analysis developed for the LP model.

Linear Programming (LP) is a mathematical procedure for determining optimal allocation of scarce resources. LP is a procedure that has found practical application in almost all facets of business, from advertising to production planning. Transportation, distribution, and aggregate production planning problems are the most typical objects of LP analysis. In the petroleum industry, for example a data processing manager at a large oil company recently estimated that from 5 to 10 percent of the firm’s computer time was devoted to the processing of LP and LP-like models. This is an tutorial how to solve linear programming problems with GeoGebra

Linear programming deals with a class of programming problems where both the objective function to be optimized is linear and all relations among the variables corresponding to resources are linear. This problem was first formulated and solved in the late 1940′s. Rarely has a new mathematical technique found such a wide range of practical business, commerce, and industrial applications and simultaneously received so thorough a theoretical development, in such a short period of time. Today, this theory is being successfully applied to problems of capital budgeting, design of diets, conservation of resources, games of strategy, economic growth prediction, and transportation systems. In very recent times, linear programming theory has also helped resolve and unify many outstanding applications.

It is important for the reader to appreciate, at the outset, that the “programming” in Linear Programming is of a different flavor than the “programming” in Computer Programming. In the former case, it means to plan and organize as in “Get with the program!”, it programs you by its solution. While in the latter case, it means to write codes for performing calculations. Training in one kind of programming has very little direct relevance to the other. In fact, the term “linear programming” was coined before the word “programming” became closely associated with computer software. This confusion is sometimes avoided by using the term linear optimization as a synonym for linear programming.

Reference:

• http://www.geogebra.org
• GeoGebraChannel – Youtube
• More on LP
• More on GeoGebra