Discrete optimisation

Within the area of discrete (or combinatorial) optimisation, the goal is to minimise
(or maximise) an objective function represented by discrete decision variables.
The value that each variable may attend is limited by certain constraints. These
problems are often reffered to as optimisation problems.

The constraints, as well as the property of the decision variables being discrete,
establish an important fact: The number of feasible solutions is finite, allthough
it might be extremely large. The task is to choose the best (with respect to
the objective function) among all these feasible solutions. If the number of solutions
is very high, this problem cannot be solved without the use of modern optimisation
techniques, like for instance integer programming and meta heuristics.

SINTEF represent state-of-the-art expertise on techniques for solving discrete
optimisation problems.