You might easily wind up steering yourself in the wrong direction. Inexperienced developers frequently misapply their knowledge of optimization and can waste a great deal of time, Ware says. For example, Ware once worked on a problem that would help UPS transition its fleet of airplanes from the slow pre-Thanksgiving season to the busy holiday season. On further examination, however, his team determined that to solve the problem, they'd need to run the model as many times as there are grains of sand on the largest beach in California. If anything, optimization has been limited by people's comfort level with the technology, says AMR's Lapide.
Users have to feel comfortable.
That's beginning to change, though, Lapide says. People are getting more comfortable that the computer is giving them better answers. Ultimately, optimization will be integrated into far more visible aspects of our lives. We are nearing a time, analysts say, when vanilla users will interact with optimization engines via Web-based front ends. For example, optimization might be used for applications such as optimized configuration.