“Mathematically, what are we trying to optimise?”
John MacLean/Millennium Images, UK
Scheduling household chores is hard. Say you have three loads of washing: a regular load that will take 110 minutes to wash and 120 to dry; a heavily soiled load that needs an extra 30 minutes to wash; and a sensitive one that will take 130 minutes to wash and 160 to dry. In which order do you wash them?
In the branch of applied maths known as operational research, this is called a two-machine problem. Lots of businesses have similar issues. One approach, to find the shortest overall…