[comment_guy]

That's pretty cool these guys get to put 1950's math to work in real life. In my experience, I was never able to sell this idea to anyone based on the (potentially justified) excuse that it was completely unmaintainable without a math guy around.

Edit: I can personally attest that potential bootstrappers would find fertile ground making a service to do this stuff for transportation companies. I know of many who basically don't try to solve this problem because they don't have the talent and don't trust their ability to maintain something bought from a consultant. They need a service they can offload it to.

[kragen]

Many of the fundamental algorithms used were developed during the 1980s and 1990s, as were modeling languages like AMPL. So it's not 1950s math, even if the "simplex algorithm" was discovered in 1947.

It occurs to me that such a "service" could to a significant extent pick winners and losers among transportation companies; whoever they chose to plan for would have lower costs by several percent, and so would have profits several times higher than the competition.

[7thaccount]

Lots of logistics and truck companies use this behind the scenes (source: my friend writes MIP models for a trucking company). Also...many industries have been using LP/MIP models for ages. The entire US grid commits generators and dispatches them with MIP solvers running some MASSIVE models 24/7 (source: I work with that software).