andrew771

Edit: formatting

> badly formatted

I apologize for this. Flexport uses the Medium.com platform, and I couldn't find any better way to write math notation than embedding LaTeX gists.

> needlessly obscure notation

I agree 100%! I would like to hear ideas about how to eliminate this notation. I feel it's keeping too many people away from the field.

> never gets around to actually writing down a model in MathProg or Pyomo or anything similar

Again, spot on. The post was long enough without explaining how to do it in Pyomo, so I'm saving that for part 3.

Hi all, author here. I'm very humbled that this made it to the front page! A few things I want to say:

1) Most of this work is a simplified copy of the papers I linked to. Special thanks to James Bookbinder and his team at University of Waterloo.

2) I'm an OR novice, and this is my first optimization project. I feel now that I can roughly model the flight assignment domain, but what the solvers do is a mystery to me, and when I read about Lagrangian relaxation and column generation, I'm lost. Fortunately I haven't needed those techniques in this project.

3) The mathematical model, when written down, looks mystifying even to me, the author, and that's unfortunate. My goal in writing this post was to reduce the mystery and explain the model in plain English (plus math notation), but in the end I'm afraid it still looks eye-glazingly complicated. Data science can be all too happy to cloak itself in mystery by writing down what are actually pretty basic equations. I don't have a good solution to this.

Most of all, I got such joy out of building the model one constraint at a time and seeing the solver follow my directions and spit out optimal solutions. I couldn't believe it worked. It was like I discovered electricity. Lastly, much credit goes to Flexport leadership for allowing me, an OR novice, to embark on this optimization project.