Before the Solver: Clarification Needs Its Own Readiness Gate
TL;DR for operators A business user can ask an optimization copilot for a schedule, allocation, or planning model while leaving objectives, constraints, or policy boundaries partly unstated. Two plausible interpretations can then produce different mathematical formulations even when both look coherent. The risk is not bad algebra. It is premature formulation. OR-Clarify, introduced in Ask Before You Optimize: Dynamic Pre-Formulation Clarification for Interactive Optimization,1 evaluates whether an agent identifies formulation-critical missing information before modeling, recovers it through questioning, avoids filling gaps with unconfirmed defaults, and stops at an appropriate point. ...