If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be al… - George Bernard Dantzig

Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war, the management of finances --all require the coordination of interrelated activities. What these complex undertakings share in common is the task of constructing a statement of actions to be performed, their timing and quantity (called a program or schedule), that, if implemented, would move the system from a given initial status as much as possible towards some defined goal

Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.

All such problems can be formulated as mathematical programming problems. Naturally, we can propose many sophisticated algorithms and a theory but the final test of a theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it.