| Syllabus |
It is a mark of modern society
that decisions must often be made under circumstances characterized
by novel conditions, limited resources, conflicting goals,
expensive
experimentation, complex organizations, uncertainty, and short
response time. Operations research (or the practical equivalent,
management science) is a field of study explicitly devoted
to aiding decision makers under such circumstances. The goal
of
operations research is to provide procedures for formulating
models of decision-making problems, finding solutions to the
models that optimize objective measures of merit, and implementing
the solutions in an attempt to solve the problems. To this
end a number of mathematical techniques have been developed
that
are exercised primarily with the help of a computer. This course
is specifically concerned with modeling problems typically
encountered in operations research studies and solving the
problems with
readily available computer programs. Subjects covered include
linear programming, integer programming, nonlinear programming,
network flow programming, probability models, queuing analysis
and simulation.
This course is for senior level students or first
year graduate students. The course is appropriate for students
from a variety of disciplines. |
