An Introduction to pulp for Python Programmers

Pulp-or (referred to as pulp for the rest of this paper) is a linear programming framework in Python. Pulp is licensed under a modified BSD license. The aim of pulp is to allow an Operations Research (OR) practitioner or programmer to express Linear Programming (LP), and Integer Programming (IP) models in python in a way similar to the conventional mathematical notation. Pulp will also solve these problems using a variety of free and non-free LP solvers. Pulp models an LP in a natural and pythonic manner. This paper is aimed at the python programmer who may wish to use pulp in their code. As such this paper contains a short introduction to LP models and their uses.