Designing Generic Algorithms for Operations Research

Design solutions have been proposed to implement generic data structures, however there is no technique that advanced for algorithms. This article discusses various problems encountered when designing reusable, extensible, algorithms for operations research. It explains how to use object-oriented concepts and the notion of genericity to design algorithms that are independent of the data structures and the algorithms they use, but that can still interact deeply with them. An object-oriented design can sometimes be considered to be less efficient than a classical one, and operations research is one of these scientific fields where efficiency really matters. Hence, the main goal of this article is to explain how to design algorithms that are both generic and efficient.

The solutions discussed in this article have been implemented in the C++ language, and a is proposed to allow efficiency comparisons between the different designs.