Introduction to Operations Research

How do you allocate the available resources in your company to the various activities such that it is the most effective way for the organization as a whole? That is the leading question operations research considers. Operations Research (OR) has its roots in World War II, where special teams addressed such questions as to how to allocate you resources first. After the war OR got introduced into company life leading to an enormous spread of the use of OR. With the development of computational power at the end of the last century, larger and larger problems could be solved quickly.
Operations research is also one of the pillars of business analytics. After analyzing data and predicting what will happen, OR models can help create and advise managerial decision making.
During this course, the basics of OR will be introduced. We will discover how to formulate and solve linear programming problems. A significant emphasis of this course lies in implementing the theory, both in solving small scale problems and solving larger problems with the help of Excel Solver or other optimization software.
The following topics will be covered: Linear programming and Integer programming models, the simplex method, branch and bound and network optimization.

After this course, the student is able to:

• construct an optimization model based on a verbal problem description
• solve small-scale optimizationproblems with the correct solution technique
• interpret the outcome of the solution techniques for small-scale optimization problems

Hiller, F. S., & Lieberman, G. J. (2021). Introduction to operations research. New York: McGraw-Hill

Lecturing and (computer) exersizes

Written exam

90