Commentary—Designing Tools for Visualization and Optimization

What does the future hold for the visualization aspects of optimization? Christopher Jones's article reviews current work and makes predictions for the future. At Wolfram Research both of us have been engaged on the Mathematica^® project^[6] for most of its life. Through our work, we have gained much experience and insight into the development of integrated mathematical software. Many of the lessons that we have learned can be directly applied to the applications Jones foresees.

In his article, Jones reviews some of the ways in which visualization is crucial to operations research (OR). The simplest of these involves the effective presentation of OR results while, for more complex uses, visualization is a key element of the solution process itself. A more specialized use involves the role of visualization in developing new OR algorithms. As visualization techniques are developed and become more widespread on existing computer systems, the use of visualization in OR will become more widely used and more sophisticated.

For these ideas to reach their full potential, new tools and new techniques must be developed and embodied in actual applications. One important way this happens is through the efforts of the commercial software world. In recent years, there has been an active area of enterprise leading to the rise of whole new classes of mathematical software products. Typical applications cover the areas of statistics, graphics, and computer algebra as well as general mathematics. As an aside, it is interesting to speculate on the relationship between work in academic research institutions and the creation of these products. Because Wolfram Research is one of the key players in this field, it is interesting to consider the points that Jones makes and to compare them with our own experience.

INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.