Business operations, for example, of River Island entail decision-making that requires model formulation, which is significant as it represents the logic for business decision problem. Formulation denotes the process or procedure of changing the verbal description as well as numerical data/information to mathematical expressions that represent appropriate relationship within decision objectives, factors, as well as restrictions on the application of resources. LP (linear programming) means method applied for economic allocation or distribution of limited or scarce resources, for example material, labor, time, warehouse space, machine, energy, and capital (Fourer, Gay, & Kernighan, 2009). These limited resources are allocated to many competing activities like services, jobs, products, projects, and equipment within the operations of River Island based on some criterion of optimally. River Island can use linear programming to improve performance, profit, return on investment, distance, time, and utility. Linear programming can be used to address complex problems of operation's management requiring optimization of the objective function from the set of constraints.
River Island can use linear programming to effect changes on decision variables that are proportional to their magnitude. Linear programming appears over restrictive though it offers a robust as well as powerful analytical methodology for making fact-based decision. River Island, for example, can use linear programming in deciding how to supply every kind of product to minimize their cost of operations and this must be done within a certain set of constraints. River Island can produce adequate product to satisfy the demand of their products by use of linear programming, which enables the firm to produce within its capacity and can do that within economic costs.
River Island can use linear programming in selling its products. Products made inside the firm or bought from outside. Linear programming helps inside production utilizing limited capacity by optimizing inside cost for every unit to manufacture. Outside purchasing has a higher external cost for every unit to buy though utilizes none of the limited capacity. The use of all sources, satisfy all demands. The aim of linear programming (LP) is to optimize or minimize total cost. Besides, linear programming can be used by River Island for quick implementation of the network simplex, primal simplex, dual simplex algorithm, and barrier method. These algorithms utilize automatic CPLEX to speed up performance (Glackin, Ecker, & Kupferschmid, 2009).
Those managing and controlling systems and equipment within River Island can experience the continuing challenge of improving system performance. The challenge can be one of lowering the operation costs while keeping an acceptable degree of service, as well as profit of present operations. Moreover, challenge of offering higher degree of service without raising cost, sustaining a profitable operation, and at the same time satisfying imposed regulations by the government. Another challenge can be improving one aspect of quality of the product without lowering quality in another. River Island can use linear programming to identify methods or ways for improving operation of the system through constructing a model or a synthetic representation of the physical method/system that can be utilized to explain the impact of differently proposed solutions.
References
Fourer, R., Gay, D. M., & Kernighan, B. W. (2009). AMPL: A modeling language for mathematical programming. Pacific Grove, Calif. [u.a.: Thomson, Brooks, Cole.
Glackin, J., Ecker, J. G., & Kupferschmid, M. (2009). Solving Bilevel Linear Programs Using Multiple Objective Linear Programming. Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 1(2), 6-9. doi:10.1007/s10957-008-9467-2
