2nd paragraph: > A linear program is a mathematical model that defines some number of variables, linear constraints, and a linear objective function. When some

2nd paragraph: > A linear program is a mathematical model that defines some number of variables, linear constraints, and a linear objective function. When some variables are forced to be integer (ILPs), you can solve a lot of useful problems like scheduling, routing, and packing. That’s basically how all supply chain optimization works. The author clearly expects the audience to know what an "objective function" is (it's something that you want to optimize, e.g. minimizing fuel on a delivery route). Furthermore: > Fast forward to today, when my colleague pointed me to this 2023 paper by Microsoft researchers Beibin Li, Konstantina Mellou, Bo Zhang, Jeevan Pathuri, and Ishai Menache, “Large Language Models for Supply Chain Optimization”. They basically did the same thing as me, but added an LLM to convert natural language queries to their structured query language. The colleague who pointed me to this was working on a similar idea. The author isn't showing examples of their idea, because another group did the same thing but arguably better, so they linked to that paper instead.