exact-vs-heuristic

Choose between an exact solver and a heuristic for a hard planning problem, and set honest expectations on speed, plan quality and explainability. Use when a routing, delivery, scheduling, rostering, packing, knapsack, assignment or network model runs too long or never finishes; when someone asks for the optimal plan for hundreds or thousands of stops, jobs or items; mentions the travelling salesman or vehicle routing problem, greedy algorithms, local or neighbourhood search, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, OR-Tools routing, a MIP gap, rolling horizon or decomposition; or when planners need a good plan in minutes rather than a perfect plan tomorrow.