APPENDED ARE AN INTRODUCTION TO VECTORS AND SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS, A MATRIX ALGEBRA APPROACH TO LINEAR PROGRAMMING, AND ELEMENTS OF PROBABILITY. ALL CHAPTERS INCLUDE EXERCISES AND REFERENCES. FOR THE MOST PART, THE CHAPTERS ARE SELF-SUFFICIENT IN THE SENSE THAT THEY DO NOT RELY ON THE MATERIAL COVERED IN EARLIER CHAPTERS. NONSIMPLEX BASED NONLINEAR PROGRAMMING, SIMPLEX BASED NONLINEAR PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES, SIMULATION, AND HEURISTIC PROBLEM SOLVING ARE SUBJECTS OF THE CONCLUDING CHAPTERS. ALSO DISCUSSED ARE DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING, MARKOV CHAINS, THE MARKOVIAN DECISION PROCESSES, WAITING LINE MODELS, CLASSICAL OPTIMIZATION METHODS WITH APPLICATION TO INVENTORY CONTROL, AND INTEGER PROGRAMMING. CHAPTERS DISCUSS THE METHODOLOGY OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH, LINEAR PROGRAMMING, THE SIMPLEX METHOD, DUALITY AND POSTOPTIMAL ANALYSIS, NETWORKS AND THE TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM, AND PROJECT PLANNING AND SCHEDULING TECHNIQUES. Operations research (or operational research, as its called in Europe) refers to scientific methods (statistical and mathematical modeling, experiments. THE TEXT IS SUITED FOR INTRODUCTORY AND INTERMEDIATE COURSES IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH AT A JUNIOR, SENIOR, OR FIRST-YEAR GRADUATE LEVEL. Read 'An optimisation technique for crashing PERT network in project management, International Journal of Operational Research' on DeepDyve, the largest online rental service for scholarly research with thousands of academic publications available at your fingertips. ALTHOUGH THE MATHEMATICAL SOPHISTICATION OF THE TEXT IS NOT DEMANDING, THE LOGIC USED IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH REQUIRES A FACILITY TO THINK QUANTITATIVELY. HOWEVER, IT IS ASSUMED THAT THE READER HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO THE MATERIAL TAUGHT IN ELEMENTARY COLLEGE ALGEBRA, DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS, AND INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS COURSES.
MATHEMATICAL PREREQUISITES ARE KEPT TO A MINIMUM FOR THIS TEXT.