Chapter eight - Integer programming

Abstract

This chapter includes linear and nonlinear programming problems that involve integer-valued variables. The strategy to solve the integer value problem may involve rounding off the optimum value of the variables to the nearest integer value. This technique can be easy in terms of economy of efforts, time, and cost that might be required to derive an integer solution. However, the solution may not satisfy all the given constraints, and the value of the objective function may also be not optimal. But those difficulties can be managed if the given problem is investigated by integer programming techniques. In real-life problems such as capital budgeting, construction scheduling, batch size, and capacity expansion, and so on, integer programming techniques are used to determine the field variables. As such, here we will see the various types of integer programming problems and techniques to solve them as well as different example problems will be illustrated.