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Once we have solved an LP, we may find ourselves interested in more than just the solution.   We may be interested in knowing what happens to our solution as we change one of the coefficients.   In other words, we may wish to know how sensitive our solution is to changes in the data.   We call this sensitivity analysis.

One way to learn this information is to change one of the coefficients and re-solve the problem.   Fortunately, there is a better way.  The output of the simplex method gives us information about what happens as we change the right hand side of a constraint, or as we change the objective function coefficient on a variable.

In order to motivate this analysis, we will return to a 2-dimensional example and look at the graphic effects of changing coefficients.   We will first consider changing the right hand side of a constraint.