Duality Theory

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Duality Theory

One of the most important discoveries in the early development of linear programming was the concept of duality and its many important ramifications. This discovery revealed that every linear programming problem has associated with it another linear programming problem called the dual. The relationships between the dual problem and the original problem (called the primal) prove to be extremely useful in a variety of ways. For example, you soon will see that the shadow prices described in Sec. 4.7 actually are provided by the optimal solution for the dual problem. We shall describe many other valuable applications of duality theory in this chapter as well.

For greater clarity, the first three sections discuss duality theory under the as- sumption that the primal linear programming problem is in our standard form (but with no restriction that the bi values need to be positive). Other forms are then discussed in Sec. 6.4. We begin the chapter by introducing the essence of duality theory and its applications. We then describe the economic interpretation of the dual problem (Sec. 6.2) and delve deeper into the relationships between the primal and dual problems (Sec. 6.3). Section 6.5 focuses on the role of duality theory in sensitivity analysis. (As discussed in detail in the next chapter, sensitivity analysis involves the analysis of the effect on the optimal solution if changes occur in the values of some of the parameters of the model.)

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