As we mentioned in the previous section, whenever you are modeling situations in real life there will typically be one or more groups of related objects. Examples of such objects might include factories, customers, vehicles, or employees. LINGO allows you to group these related objects together into sets. Once the objects in your model are grouped into sets, you can make use of set-based functions to unleash the full power of the LINGO modeling language.

Having given you a brief introduction into the use of sets in Getting Started with LINGO, we will now go into greater depth as to how you construct sets and initialize set attributes with data. This will then give us the ability to begin constructing some interesting and useful examples. Once you've viewed this section, you should have a basic understanding of how to go about applying set-based modeling techniques to your own models.