An evaluation of mathematical programming and minicomputers

The availability of efficient mathematical software on minicomputers could greatly increase the use of operations research techniques in industry and government. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a particular class of mathematical programming algorithms, namely shortest path algorithms, on “typical” minicomputers. Two distinct shortest path algorithms were tested on four computer systems using a common set of test problems. Computational results are presented which verify the feasibility of implementing these algorithms in a minicomputer environment, and also show the relative efficiency of each algorithm to be the same when tested on a minicomputer as when tested on a large-scale computer system.