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Operations Research is a bouquet of mathematical techniques that have evolved over the last six decades to improve the process of business decision making. Operations Research offers tools to optimize and find the best solutions to myriad decisions that managers have to take in their day to day operations or while carrying out strategic planning. Today, with the advent of operations research software, these tools can be applied by managers even without any knowledge of the mathematical techniques that underlie the solution procedures.
The book starts with a brief introduction to various tools of operations research, such as linear programming and integer programming together with simple examples formulated and solved using the operations research software LINGO.
The book intends to make the readers aware of the power and potential of operations research in addressing decision making in areas of operations, supply chain, and financial and marketing management. The approach of this book is to demonstrate the solution to specific problems in these areas using operations research techniques and LINGO software. The reader is encouraged to use the accompanying software models to solve these problems, using detailed do-it-yourself instructions and the limited version of LINGO software available at the “Downloads-Try Lingo” tab of the website www.lindo.com. The intended outcome for readers of this book will be gaining familiarity with and an intuitive understanding of the various tools of operations research and their applications to various business situations. It is expected that this will give the readers the ability and confidence to devise models for their own business needs.
About the Author:
Bodhibrata Nag is an Associate Professor of the Operations Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he teaches Operations Research, Operations & Supply Chain Management and Project Management. His research interests include applications of Operations Research in areas of logistics, transportation, energy, supply chain management and the public sector. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras with a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering. He received his doctorate in Operations Research and Systems Analysis from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He has nearly two decades of experience in the energy and transportation industry and academia, having served in senior positions in the Indian Railways and the Central Electricity Authority. He has been trained in case study method of teaching and case development at the Harvard Business School. He has been a visiting research faculty at the Industrial and Operations Engineering Department of the University Of Michigan and the Decision Systems Group of BNSF Railway as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow. He has received several teaching awards. He has authored a book Optimal Design of Timetables for Large Railways and co-authored the Special Indian Edition of Hillier & Lieberman’s classic textbook, Introduction to Operations Research.
