In yesterday's blog, I gave a brief overview of what Linear Programming is and the main equations that are used to specify a Linear Programming decision problem.

Today I want to provide you with some resources you might use to learn how to use Linear Programming to optimize some aspect of your business.

The first resource that I would direct you to are a series of IBM developerWorks articles on using the GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK) to solve linear programming problems. This 3 part series walks you through 5 different problem scenarios that you can apply linear programming to and how to specify the equations in a format that the GLPK Solver can work with.

• The GNU Linear Programming Kit, Part 1: Introduction to linear optimization
• The GNU Linear Programming Kit, Part 2: Intermediate problems in linear programming
• The GNU Linear Programming Kit, Part 3: Advanced problems and elegant solutions

The second set of resources I would point you to are the links to free opensource software that can be used to solve linear programming problems (often referred to as "LP Solvers").

The two main high-qualtiy opensource LP Solver packages that I am aware of are the GLPK package mentioned in the article links above and the LPSolve package. Here are a couple of links to learn more about these packages.

• Wikipedia Page for GLPK. The page has useful links to various implementations of GLPK, including a javascript-based one that looks interesting as it would be easy to embed in a web page.
• LPSolve Reference Guide. In my opinion, LPSolve's main feature is that is has bindings for many popular programming languages which makes it easy to call from these languages. Also, the documentation is quite good.

The 3 tutorial links and the links to 2 high-quality LP Solvers should help you to get started in learning more about the nuts and bolts of Linear Programming and whether it might be useful in the context of optimizing some aspect of your business.