Linear programming model discovery from databases using GPS and artificial neural networks

The linear programming model is a special form of useful knowledge that is embedded in a database. Since formulating models from scratch requires knowledge-intensive efforts, knowledge-based formulation support systems have been proposed in the Decision Support Systems area. However, they rely on the assumption that sufficient domain knowledge should already be captured as a specific knowledge representation form. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology that finds useful knowledge on building linear programming models from a database. The methodology consists of two parts. The first part is to find s first-cut model based on a data dictionary. To do so, we applied the General Problem Solver (GPS) algorithm. The second part is to discover a second-cut model by applying neural network technique. An illustrative example is described to show the feasibility of the proposed methodology.