Goal Programming

This provides a more realistic model. In a modern setting, profit maximization may not be the only objective of a business concern. Other objectives or goals could be sound ecological management, networking in the neighborhood and maximizing market share. These goals may dominate the earlier objective.

The idea is that a decision maker may not always be searching for an optimal solution but a "satisfying" solution that attempts to satisfy the many concerns of the management. Prof. Herbert A. Simon felt that a manager may not be able to optimize but may have to "satisfy".

Simplex method requires one goal. The goals are weighted and a single objective function is constructed which is then optimized to solve a goal programming problem.