Abstract Operations Research Modeling Using Natural Language Inputs

Operations research (OR) uses mathematical models to enhance decision making, but developing these models requires expert knowledge and can be time-consuming. Automated mathematical programming (AMP) has emerged to simplify this process, but existing systems have limitations. This paper introduces a novel methodology that uses recent advances in a large language model (LLM) to create and edit abstract OR models from non-expert user queries expressed using natural language. This reduces the need for domain expertise and the time to formulate a problem, and an abstract OR model generated can be deployed to a multi-tenant platform to support a class of users with different input data. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline, named NL2OR, that generates solutions to OR problems from natural language input, and shares experimental results on several important OR problems.