Terms and Conditions:

Ger Koole wrote:These lecture notes can be freely copied, as long as they are distributed as a whole, including the cover pages.

Notes Excerpts:

These lecture notes pay attention to all aspects of the modeling process, while giving a central place to the business problem. This is what makes these lecture notes different from most other books on operations research, in which the model and its solution techniques are the only subjects. This does not mean that these lecture notes could be read instead of an introductory book on models and solution techniques. On the contrary, these notes can well be used for a graduate course in applications of OR/MS, assuming that the student already followed introductory courses in operations research and probability. At the same time, certain chapters should be also appealing to students with a more qualitative background, and that they help to give a sound idea of the possibilities of operations research for solving business problems.

Notes Overview:

These notes consist of three parts.

The first part deals with mathematical models. They give an overview of stochastic models that are used in business applications. The focus is not on all mathematical details and possible extensions, but on the use in applications.

The second part deals with modeling, some general properties of models, and software that is helpful when solving models. These chapters aim to give a general idea of the process of solving business problems using mathematical models. No prior knowledge is needed to read these chapters.

The third part is about various application areas. It starts with an introductory chapter giving an overview of application domains where OR/MS is succesfully used. It also explains which subjects can be found in the following chapters. In each of these chapters an application area is introduced and the standard models are discussed. The focus is not on solving the models, but on the interplay between the business problems and the mathematical models.

Prerequisites:

These lecture notes are written for students and professionals with some background in probability theory and mathematical methods of OR/MS. Students often have little knowledge of the non-mathematical aspects of OR/MS. For this reason a course based on this book should contains all chapters of Part II and some chapters of Part III. The Chapters of Part I deal with the usual subjects of an introduction to stochastic models. Students who have already followed a course on this subject can skip (parts of) these chapters.