NP‑hard decision problems
The hardest decisions in industry are the same handful of problems.
What to load on which truck. Which jobs run on which machine. Where workloads go in a data centre. Who works which shift. Which projects get funded. Underneath the industry language it is the same hard mathematics — and it is where computers struggle most. heurics builds one engine for that mathematics, and applies it alongside the people who make these decisions.
What “NP‑hard” means in practice
Too many possibilities to ever check, and no shortcut to the best one.
Some problems get harder in a way that no faster computer can rescue. Add one more item and the number of possible answers doesn’t grow — it multiplies. Choosing 30 things out of 100, a small problem by industrial standards, already allows more combinations than there are grains of sand on Earth.
So nobody checks them all. In practice a business gets one of two things: an exact solver that can prove its answer is the best one, but only up to a certain size, or a rule of thumb that answers instantly and leaves value on the table that nobody can measure. Most real decisions are made in the gap between the two.
Problems we’re exploring
Ten places a hard decision shows up every day.
These are the problems we are focused on today. Because the engine is general, the list grows with every conversation — if the hard decision in your work is not here, bring it to us.
Cloud & data centres
GPU cluster defragmentation
Capacity sits stranded in half-full machines, so new jobs wait while expensive GPUs stay idle.
Warehousing
Slotting and pick batching
Pickers spend much of their shift walking because fast-moving items sit in the wrong places.
Mortgage finance
Loan pooling
Closed loans are assigned to pools by hand or with simple tools, and small misallocations add up across every month.
Education
Course and exam timetabling
Thousands of sessions, rooms and students must fit together, and one change ripples through everything.
Sales
Territory alignment
Accounts have to be split fairly between reps, and every re-draw upsets someone’s patch.
Fixed income
Bond portfolios for small accounts
Lot sizes and minimums make it hard to build a sensible portfolio when the account is small.
Manufacturing
Facility and plant layout
Where each machine and station sits decides how far people and materials travel, every day.
Strategy & finance
Capital project selection
There are more worthwhile projects than budget each year, and the shortlist is usually built from rankings and spreadsheets.
Aviation
Airport gate and stand allocation
Flights must be matched to gates while delays keep rewriting the plan, hour by hour.
Telecoms
Tracking-area and cell-ID planning
Cells have to be grouped so that paging load stays manageable and handovers stay smooth.
The engine
One engine for the whole family, fast enough to use inside the working day.
heurics is a general-purpose engine for these problems. Rather than a bespoke model for each, the same engine takes the decision, the objective and the rules that cannot be broken, and searches for the best answer it can find in the time available — on ordinary hardware, not a cluster.
Answers you can act on
Every answer respects every hard rule. Stop the clock whenever you like and what is on the table is usable.
Scale past where solvers stop
The interesting sizes are the ones where an exact solver stops proving anything. That is the range we build for.
Speed that changes the workflow
An overnight run gets done once. A run that takes seconds gets done ten different ways before the decision is made.
Every product we build is this engine, with one industry’s language in front of it.
Benchmarks
Tested on the field’s own problems.
We test the engine on public benchmark libraries and on real published traces, across several problem families: cloud placement, selection, packing and scheduling. Each result is published in the research notes with its method and limits, once the run behind it has been validated end to end.
Let’s connect
Got a hard decision you make again and again?
If you make a hard decision again and again, in any industry, tell us how it is done today, the last time it went wrong and what that cost, and what you would do if a good answer arrived in seconds.
A reply by email is just as welcome as a call.
connect@heurics.com