I already wrote it above: Operations Research is going to rely heavily on algorithms, mathematics and statistics. The three key items of any Operations Research topic: 1. Whenever we translate a business question in an optimization question, it is primordial that we have clear definitions of a cost to minimize or a benefit to maximize. Operations Research uses mathematics and statistics to answer optimization and simulation questions. Depending on the chosen cost function, you can optimize the total duration of operations, or the cost or benefit.Ī number of sequencing methods are First Come First Served (FCFS), Shortest Processing Time (SPC), Earliest Due Date (EDD), and more.Īlthough there are more applications of Operations Research, I think the general idea is clear now and I will move on to a more formal description of the topic. In this situation, we can choose from many different orders of execution and we want to make sure we choose the best order. This topic deals with defining the order of a large number of operations to execute with a limited number of resources. I lastly want to list Sequencing Problems.
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Put your cargo in the right order thanks to Operations Research. A good example of this type of data is a social media network where each person (profile) is represented as a node and each friendship relationship is represented as an edge. Each node is a point and each edge indicates whether there is a connection between certain different nodes. In Graph theory in general, graphs exist of nodes and edges. In Network Analysis, an application is represented as a graph to be optimized. Network Analysis is a topic that is relatively different from the previously listed items. Therefore this is also a good question for optimization with Operations Research. For expensive items like machinery, cars, computers, etc there is a huge cost for a company when replacing them too late, but also when replacing them too early.
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Replacement problems are relatively comparable to the previous: optimizing the replacement of materials that are known to fail after a certain time of usage. I hope that at this point the types of problems treated in Operations Research are already getting clearer for you. If you want to go further into inventory management, you should definitely have a look into those. The most-used algorithms for Inventory Management are Economic Order Quantity (EOQ), Inventory Production Quantity (IPQ) and ABC Analysis. Inventory Control Systems regroup different solutions that solve the totality of an organization’s inventory tasks. Inventory Control for a company is complicated and depends on many decisions, for example, purchasing, warehousing, shipping, tracking and more, The next topic solved by Operations Research is Inventory Control. Once this is done, Queuing Theory allows a business to understand and improve queuing times for customers and at the same time workforce management.Īnother important application of Queuing theory is task scheduling by computer’s Operation Systems, although that’s quite far from the other applications discussed in this article. Maybe less obvious than the previous example, but a waiting line can just as well be described perfectly in mathematical terms.
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The second topic in Operations Research is Queuing Theory. Queuing theory: avoid long lines, but also avoid overstaffing.