I've learned approaches like this when I took a Operations Research class. I found it all exciting. We've also learned techniques to better choose between meta-heuristics like CGRASP, or flat algos, or integer programming, and so on. Now I'm seeing if I can think of some cool pet project where I can apply this stuff.
Oh, I also applied lots of linear and integer programming.
The main benefit of something like integer programming is that you get a clear separation of the specification of your solution and the algorithm that computes it.
When even smart people naively attack any kind of optimization (or selection) problem, the resulting approach often mixes the business logic for specifying the optimum solution and the code for finding that optimum.
That makes any change in business requirements very hard to implement.
