Analyzing the potential of a firm: An operations research approach

An approach to analyzing the potential of a firm, which is understood as the firm's ability to provide goods or (and) services to be supplied to a marketplace under restrictions imposed by a business environment in which the firm functions, is proposed. The approach is based on using linear inequalities and, generally, mixed variables in modelling this ability for a broad spectrum of industrial, transportation, agricultural, and other types of firms and allows one to formulate problems of analyzing the potential of a firm as linear programming problems or mixed programming problems with linear constraints. This approach generalizes the one proposed by the author earlier for a more narrow class of models and allows one to effectively employ a widely available software for solving practical problems of the considered kind, especially for firms described by large scale models of mathematical programming. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.