At Google, our organization designs, owns, and maintains a number of optimization models that automate the planning of Google’s datacenter growth and health. As is pretty standard in supply chain optimization and planning, these models are often integer linear programs. It’s a core competency of operations research, after all. One might think, “Large optimization problems? That sounds hard!” But it’s actually far from the hardest part of the job. In fact, it’s one of the few excit...
