
Ask HN: Diamond cutting – any other industries using optimization software? - throwawaybutwhy
Recently, I&#x27;ve dived into the rabbit hole of diamond cutting videos on Youtube. Turns out there are a bunch of companies (e.g. sarine - btw, an eyebrow-raising name if there ever was one) making hardware and software for the industry with rather advanced optimization algorithms.<p>What are other niche verticals where optimization software is in widespread use? (Crude refineries aren&#x27;t niche, and as far as I know, they are fond of linear programming)
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newswasboring
I work in semiconductor manufacturing which is basically a giant inverse
problem (technically IMHO everything is). I personally work on optimization
software which finds the best setting for 7 out of a few hundred settings
(collection of settings is called a recipe). We used to use a semi brute force
approach and then moved to GA. Currently research is ongoing about mixed
integer surrogate models.

The Apps market for this industry is huge. The Apps department of one of the
biggest equipment manufacturers itself, if counted separately, is in top 10
biggest companies in semiconductor equipment companies.

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IronyMan42
I work in a semiconductor lab at a university so i don't know how the industry
actually looks like but i'd love to hear about this. What Apps are used and
what do they do?

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shoo
scheduling people, scheduling trains, scheduling production jobs. figuring out
where to locate telecommunications equipment and how to route cables to avoid
digging new holes in the ground. figuring out the most profitable way to blend
together raw inputs to produce some commodity. figuring out the most
profitable way to chop some raw input (e.g. meat) into pieces to fill orders.

pick a vendor of optimisation software and leaf through case studies or client
lists:

[https://www.gurobi.com/customers/case-
studies/](https://www.gurobi.com/customers/case-studies/)

[https://www.localsolver.com/clientsandpartners.html](https://www.localsolver.com/clientsandpartners.html)

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throwawaybutwhy
Thanks, great examples. Also CPLEX, most of the time these folks tend to offer
the same set of tools across all the niches.

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new23d
Logistics.

Lots of research papers I noticed from Chinese universities about a decade ago
on how to best package given dimensions and with constraints like what
material cannot be packaged alongside what, into containers of given sizes.

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thedevindevops
Aerospace - a company I worked for used a simulated annealing variant to
optimise aircraft placement and scheduling according to a rule engine for a
series of airports.

