Re: What about utility to calculate planner cost constants?

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu (Greg Stark) wrote:
> I don't think it would be very hard at all actually.
>
> It's just a linear algebra problem with a bunch of independent
> variables and a system of equations. Solving for values for all of
> them is a straightforward problem.
>
> Of course in reality these variables aren't actually independent
> because the costing model isn't perfect. But that wouldn't be a
> problem, it would just reduce the accuracy of the results.

Are you certain it's a linear system? I'm not. If it was a matter of
minimizing a linear expression subject to some set of linear
equations, then we could model this as a Linear Program for which
there are some perfectly good solvers available. (Few with BSD-style
licenses, but we could probably get some insight out of running for a
while with something that's there...)

I think there's good reason to consider it to be distinctly
NON-linear, which makes it way more challenging to solve the problem.

There might well be some results to be gotten out of a linear
approximation; the Grand Challenge is to come up with the model in the
first place...
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