Optimization of business game decisions

Business games are training educational tools that create virtual economic environments and put in competition several teams of participants. At each turn of the game, participants must take a set of economical decisions in order to develop the firm with the best financial performance. These decisions deal with production aspects as well as distribution ones, for example. Taking such decisions is very complex and the aim of this article is to explore how an optimization process could help the participants to optimize theirs decisions. This optimization process should be able to propose a set of good decisions to improve firm profitability and to assume customers needs. In this article, the example of the business game UpStrat is used. In order to solve the problem in a reasonable time, we propose an original approach that consists in a hybrid method based on a mixed integer program and a local search. Therefore, a realistic mixed integer model of all the parts (production, distribution, financial, commercial...) is developed and presented in this paper.