# Introduction

We start this section with an introductory example: the Knapsack Problem.

The goal is to put as many of $$n$$ items as possible with value $$v_i$$ and weight $$w_i$$ in a bag of capacity $$W$$. Imagine you are a shipping company and you need to decide what items you would like to put into a shipment container such that the overall profit is maximized.

$\begin{equation*} \begin{array}{ll@{}ll} \text{max} & \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} v_{i}x_{i} & &\\ \text{subject to}& \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} w_{i}x_{i} \leq W, & &\\ & x_{i} \in \{0,1\}, &i=1 ,\ldots, n& \end{array} \end{equation*}$

As alluded to in the beginning, this integer program consists of 3 parts:

• An objective function (here it is the sum of item values)
• A set of contraints. In this case, there is only one constraint that total weight of all items does not exceed the weight capacity $$W$$.
• Some conditions on the variables. All variables are binary, meaning they are bounded by 0/1 and are integers. This allows the variables to be either 0 or 1.

Having derived such a model that describes a relevant optimization problem, we need to solve it. The first step is to encode the problem in a way that an algorithm can understand it (the most basic form is a set of vectors and a constraint matrix). Having such a standard interface, many specialized solvers have been developed over the years (both commercial and open-source) to solve these kind of problems at a scale required for real world problems.

R has many packages that help you model and solve mixed-integer linear programs. The section about modelling packages shows how to model this problem in R.

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