Operational Research Methods


Recommended Reading

Appealing both to students on introductory courses for quantitative methods and MBA students, this well-respected text provides an accessible introduction to an area that students often find difficult. As a manager, developing a good understanding of the business analysis techniques at your disposal is crucial. Knowing how and when to use them and what their results really mean can be the difference between making a good or bad decision and, ultimately, between business success and failure. Quantitative Methods for Decision Makers helps students to understand the relevance of quantitative methods of analysis to manager’s decision-making by relating techniques directly to real-life business decisions in public and private sector organisations and focusing on developing appropriate skills and understanding of how the techniques fit into the wider management process.

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Management Science in Practice

by Terry Williams

Management Science in Practice contains four similarly sized parts. Part 1 defines the field of Management Science, lays the foundations and gives an overview of the history. Part 2 describes the analysis toolbox used by the MS professional and contains topics such as Multi-Methodology, problem structuring techniques and analysis techniques. Part 3 looks at the key practical skills that OR graduates lack. Part 4 gives a brief overview of the current state of the OR profession. It outlines the current knowledge about the reflective practitioner to give guidance to the OR practitioner. It also looks at the ethics in an OR context and the future for the profession. Terry Williams is well known in the OR field and is currently a joint Editor of the Journal of the Operational Research Society. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), fellow of the OR Society, a chartered Mathematician and a certified Project Management Professional.

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The OR Society publishes many articles in its various journals. Some of these articles are summarised here. We will gradually add to these summaries, to ensure comprehensive coverage all of the main areas and techniques of operational research (OR). We have provided links to the full articles, available to members. The sections currently available (some contain several articles) are:

Agent Based Modelling

Tutorial on agent-based modelling and simulation

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Bayesian Analysis

A Bayesian network structure for operational risk modelling in structured finance operations

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Data Envelopment Analysis

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Data Provenance

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Data Warehousing

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Fuzzy Systems

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Grey Models

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Heuristics

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Multicriteria Analysis

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Neural Networks

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Optimization

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Performance Measurement

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Simulation

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System Dynamics

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Vehicle Routing Problem

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