6 In the same vein, the ECB increased the amount of refinancing provided via longer-term refinancing operations, with a view to reduce the liquidity gaps of the banking system and to smooth conditions in the term money market. It correspondingly reduced the amounts allotted at the weekly main refinancing operations so that the total amount of outstanding liquidity supply remained unchanged.
Since there are specialized algorithms that solve linear programming problems very fast, we had, in principle, a method to choose a set of transactions with maximum value that could be settled with the available resources.