240 Numerical Methods and Optimization: An Introduction
Since the objective function is expressed in terms of nonbasic variables only,
the only way for us to change the value of z is by changing at least one of
the nonbasic variables from 0 to some positive value (recall that all variables
must be nonnegative). To increase the value of z, we can increase the value of
a nonbasic variable that has a positive coefficient in the objective. Due to the
linearity of the objective function, increasing a variable by 1 unit will change
the objective by value equal to the coefficient of that variable in the z-row
of the dictionary. Thus, to get the highest possible increase in the objective
per unit of increase in the variable value, it makes sense to try to increase ...