IMO, the main benefit of those exact algos are the they provide optimality bounds, allowing you to make informed decision to continue or stop and provide a non-

IMO, the main benefit of those exact algos are the they provide optimality bounds, allowing you to make informed decision to continue or stop and provide a non-optimal solution. This is valuable in many practical situations. >Time scheduling, logistics, operations... Add marketing (pricing, assortment, ...) and finance (portfolio, captial budgeting, ...) to those. And those are huge domains, moving trillions of USD globally each year. Many companies (think most of the Global 2000) benefit from a couple % improvement on their operations that lead to many $$ in savings.