Optimal solutions versus ‘good’ solutions: An analysis of heuristic decision making

The portion of business problems which lend themselves to solution by existing optimization techniques are a minor subset of the business problems which can be defined and attacked by logical devices. Heuristics simplify the environment of the decision maker by permitting him to make decisions quickly without considering the innumerable ways that each decision could be made. This paper compares the heuristic programming approach to more traditional operations research techniques of decision making.