Rémi Lequette, my friend and colleague from ILOG and LLamasoft, has recreated Oil Slick online. Here is the link.
As a reminder, Opex Analytics and LLamasoft created the game to teach why optimization technology is valuable.
The game went offline several years ago. I know that many people used it to teach optimization. In August 2022, I created a janky Excel version as a patch. Here is that article with some links to a version with OpenSolver and the guides created by Sara Hoormann.
But now the game is back. Try it out.
Here is how I like to teach it.
I start with three strategies that I admit aren’t going to lead to the lowest cost— but that some organizations might use:
Pick a well and refinery that both have 100 units of capacity. This is a ‘simple’ plan.
Pick the cheapest well, followed by its cheapest refinery. You might get this plan if the manager of just the wells made the decision.
Pick the cheapest refinery, then its cheapest well. You might get this plan if the manager of just the refineries made the decision.
It is clear to the students that they could do better. So, then we rank the cheapest combinations of wells to refineries and go down that list.
This seems like an optimal solution. But this is the punchline: I then ask the students to find an even cheaper plan and explain why that worked. This lets you talk about greedy strategies and how shared resources (capacity in this case) make optimization technology valuable.
Glad the game is back!, love to use it for teaching purposes and to highlight the advantages of optimization
Finally back online! Have really missed this the past few years. Thank you Michael and Remi :)