Optimization Workshop at
Annual Business Analytics Case Competition

Every year, our student club organizes a business analytics case competition (BACC) for pre-university students and current engineering undergraduates. This year’s competition was jointly organized with Micron. As part of the event, we (Napat and Chin Hon) were invited by the ISE club to conduct an optimization workshop for the participants.Optimization is concerned with finding the best decision/policy that abides by a set of predetermined constraints. It has been used in various domains, such as engineering, economics, and healthcare. Many domestic and international companies have benefitted from using optimization one way or another. In this workshop, we gave several examples of practical “linear” optimization problems. We also looked at how to transform a non-linear problem into a linear one to emphasize the flexibility of this framework.

Screenshot of MS Excel spreadsheet

There are many optimization software out there. MS Excel Solver was selected for this workshop as most participants already have a working knowledge of MS Excel.


We demonstrated how a linear optimization problem can be defined in MS Excel and solved using the Solver add-in program.


17 Mar 2022

Dr Napat Rujeerapaiboon & Dr Tan Chin Hon

The recordings of the workshop (12 Feb 2022) can be viewed below:

Introduction to Linear Optimization

Optimization using MS Excel Solver