Quantitative Analysis for Management, 13/e

10.3 Goal Programming

In today’s business environment, profit maximization or cost minimization is not always the only objective that a firm sets forth. Often, maximizing total profit is just one of several goals, including such contradictory objectives as maximizing market share, maintaining full employment, providing quality ecological management, minimizing noise level in the neighborhood, and meeting numerous other noneconomic goals.

Firms usually have more than one goal.

The shortcoming of mathematical programming techniques such as linear and integer programming is that their objective function is measured in one dimension only. It’s not possible for LP to have multiple goals unless they are all measured in the same units (such as dollars), ...