The Most Literal Employee: Linear and Mixed-Integer Optimisation

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 57m

Fictional refinery planning manager Henrike Solberg runs a weekly linear program to choose crude cargoes; new analyst Mateus Oyelaran sets out to optimise scheduling too. We cover the geometry of LP, Dantzig's simplex method, Klee-Minty and smoothed analysis, Kantorovich and Koopmans, the 1952 aviation-gasoline blending paper, shadow prices, Khachiyan and Karmarkar, distributive recursion and the pooling problem, why integer decisions make problems NP-hard, Land and Doig's branch and bound, Gomory cuts, big-M traps, Bixby's measurements of solver speedups, crude-oil scheduling as MINLP…