Furthermore, the more techniques you are comfortable with, the more likely you are to find one that is appropriate. Here, appropriateness is meant in the broadest sense, including model accuracy, time and resource limitations, data difficulties, and so on. Let me tell you another story. A couple of years ago, there was a plea for help on one of the computer bboards. Stock quotes go out in packets , giving a set of twenty or so quotes.
Customers are only interested in a subset of the quotes.
They receive one or more packets, read the information they want, and sent the packets on to their respective next customers. Stock prices are updated every ten seconds, and every customer should receive updated stock information every thirty seconds. There is more information available, but that is a start. No computer can solve integer programs of this size within the 30 second time limitation. The final story that I wanted to mention is from my own consulting activity.