Recent Advancements in Commercial Integer Optimization Solvers for Business Intelligence Applications

The chapter focuses on the recent advancements in commercial integer optimization solvers as exemplified by the CPLEX software package particularly but not limited to mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models applied to business intelligence applications. We provide background on the main underlying algorithmic method of branch-and-cut, which is based on the established optimization solution methods of branch-and-bound and cutting planes. The chapter also covers heuristic-based algorithms, which include preprocessing and probing strategies as well as the more advanced methods of local or neighborhood search for polishing solutions toward enhanced use in practical settings. Emphasis is given to both theory and implementation of the methods available. Other considerations are offered on parallelization, solution pools, and tuning tools, culminating with some concluding remarks on computational performance vis-à-vis business intelligence applications with a view toward perspective for future work in this area.

Modern Business Intelligence: Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Creating the Data-Driven Value

Currently, business intelligence (BI) systems are used extensively in many business areas that are based on making decisions to create a value. BI is the process on available data to extract, analyze and predict business-critical insights. Traditional BI focuses on collecting, extracting, and organizing data for enabling efficient and professional query processing to get insights from historical data. Due to the existing of big data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing (CC), BI became more critical and important process and received more great interest in both industry and academia fields. The main problem is how to use these new technologies for creating data-driven value for modern BI. In this chapter, to meet this problem, the importance of big data analytics, data mining, AI for building and enhancing modern BI will be introduced and discussed. In addition, challenges and opportunities for creating value of data by establishing modern BI processes.