A History of Mathematical Programming in the Petroleum Industry

The petroleum industry's extensive use of LP-based operations planning models is well known and often cited as a major triumph of applied operations research. However, few people outside of the petroleum industry realize the degree to which mathematical programming concepts and techniques have penetrated all facets of the oil business from strategic planning through process control. Mathematical programming techniques have been developed and applied, decade by decade, from the 1940s to the present and hold even greater potential for the 1990s.