Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Optimization is a general term for extremum searching (maximizing or minimizing) of particular properties. In mathematics, it is usually the value of a particular function. Optimization is also termed Operations research when applied to practical economic problems. See optimization (mathematics). In computer science, optimization is the process of improving a system in certain ways such as execution speed, memory requirements and bandwidth. Despite its name, optimization does not necessarily mean finding the optimum solution to a problem. Often this is not possible, and heuristic algorithms must be used instead. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.