This is a real life scenario that came up recently and as a thought experiment I’m trying to think about how to model.
Let’s say you’re a surgeon working at a large hospital and you have to move from a large hospital to a field hospital. You are told that you can only take a limited number of supplies and the limiting factor is the total volume of what you take. Weight is not a limiting factor.
My thought process so far is that you’d have to factor in the size of the object, the likelihood you will need it, and the criticality of the object.
Intuitively you would want something like: total volume-(volume of each object) which can’t be negative
For each object you have:
<total “points”>+=<optional weight><object criticality>+<optional weight><frequency of use>
The goal would be to maximize the points over the set of all objects.
I can think of naive ways to write a program to do that, but my intuition tells me that mathematically there is a better way than just trying all possible combinations however while I’m a good programmer I’m still working on the math piece. What would be an appropriate mathematical model for such a problem?