The literature is packed with publications of comprehensive formulations that address all relevant aspects of a given problem and methodologies to tackle these problems.
However, in many of such publications, the authors don't report any computational experiments. And when they do, it's typically on a toy version of the problem, i.e., on a very small data instance.
This situation contrasts with the following quote taken from the book Robust Optimization by Ben-Tal, El Ghaoui, Nemirovski.
"After all, what is the point in reducing something to an optimization problem that we do not know how to process computationally?"
What determines whether a particular problem is tracktable or not is a combination of the formulation and the methodology adopted to solve the problem. That's why we included this module in the program.
Specifically, in this module, we study several methodologies that has been proven effective for solving challenging real-world optimization problems from a variety of domains.
These are fairly generic strategies, but we don't expect you to use them exactly as they are presented. The key ingredient should be creativity. So to sparkle more creativity, we will present a bunch of practical examples rather than spending a lot of time talking about theory.