9.2. NP-completeness in planning problems
The provided use cases are probably NP-complete or NP-hard, which means the following statements apply:
- It is easy to verify a given solution to a problem in reasonable time.
- There is no simple way to find the optimal solution of a problem in reasonable time.
The implication is that solving your problem is probably harder than you anticipated, because the two common techniques do not suffice:
- A brute force algorithm (even a more advanced variant) takes too long.
- A quick algorithm, for example in the bin packing problem, putting in the largest items first returns a solution that is far from optimal.
By using advanced optimization algorithms, Business Optimizer finds a good solution in reasonable time for such planning problems.