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Help with combinatorial optimization Optimization Rate Topic: -----

#1 moterpoker 


Lepton
Hi all,
I need a little help regarding simple optimization:
There are a given number of pairs of positive numbers for e.g. (a_1,  b_1), (a_2, b_2)... (a_N, b_N). The objective is to choose a subset S of some pairs:

\max \sum_{i \in S} a_i

s.t \sum_{i \in S} b_i\le B

In other words, this problem can be thought as follows: You have some bank balance B and there are number of different products in the market of price lets say b_i that give some utility a_i. Objective is to maximize utility (choose some number of products) subject to bank balance. What are such kind of problems called? Also, you can also assume that whenever b_1>b_2, then a_1>a_2 that is whenever something is expensive, it also gives better utility. I am not sure if this could be important.

Also if possible, can someone suggest how could this be solved (a fast method rather than exhaustive search)? (Taking the maximum a_i's until the budget is satisfied is not optimal in general for e.g. large number of small cheap products can give better overall utility than fewer high utility expensive products).

Thanks

This post has been edited by moterpoker: 18 September 2011 - 07:50 AM

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#2 moterpoker 


Lepton
Nevermind. I found the answer. It is 0-1 Knapsack problem :)
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