Operations Research Applications

The market-leading textbook for the course, Winston's OPERATIONS RESEARCH owes much of its success to its practical orientation and consistent emphasis on model formulation and model building. It moves beyond a mere study of algorithms without sacrificing the rigor that faculty desire. As in every edition, Winston reinforces the book's successful features and coverage with the most recent developments in the field. The Student Suite CD-ROM, which now accompanies every new copy of the text, contains the latest versions of commercial software for optimization, simulation, and decision analysis. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

As operations research (OR) applications continue to grow and flourish in a number of decision making fields, a reference that is comprehensive, concise, and easy to read is more than a nicety, it is a necessity. This book provides a single volume overview of OR applications in practice, making it the first resource a practitioner would reach for when faced with an OR problem or application. Written by leading authorities in the field, the book covers functional and industry specific areas of OR applications. Ideally suited for practitioners in business, industry, and government, the book can also be used as a supplemental text in undergraduate or graduate OR courses.

This book offers a comprehensive reference guide to operations research theory and applications in health care systems. It provides readers with all the necessary tools for solving health care problems. The respective chapters, written by prominent researchers, explain a wealth of both basic and advanced concepts of operations research for the management of operating rooms, intensive care units, supply chain, emergency medical service, human resources, lean health care, and procurement. To foster a better understanding, the chapters include relevant examples or case studies. Taken together, they form an excellent reference guide for researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students pursuing research on health care management problems. The book presents a dynamic snapshot on the field that is expected to stimulate new directions and stimulate new ideas and developments.

These proceedings consist of 30 selected research papers based on results presented at the 10th Balkan Conference & 1st International Symposium on Operational Research (BALCOR 2011) held in Thessaloniki, Greece, September 22-24, 2011. BALCOR is an established biennial conference attended by a large number of faculty, researchers and students from the Balkan countries but also from other European and Mediterranean countries as well. Over the past decade, the BALCOR conference has facilitated the exchange of scientific and technical information on the subject of Operations Research and related fields such as Mathematical Programming, Game Theory, Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis, Information Systems, Data Mining and more, in order to promote international scientific cooperation. The carefully selected and refereed papers present important recent developments and modern applications and will serve as excellent reference for students, researchers and practitioners in these disciplines. ​

This textbook is comprised of detailed case studies covering challenging real world applications of OR techniques. Among the overall goals of the book is to provide readers with descriptions of the history and other background information on a variety of industries, service or other organizations in which decision making is an important component of their daily operations. The book considers all methods of optimum decision making in order to improve performances. It also compares possible solutions obtained by different approaches, concluding with a recommendation of the best among them for implementation. By exposing students to a variety of applications in a variety of areas and explaining how they can be modeled and solved, the book helps students develop the skills needed for modeling and solving problems that they may face in the workplace. Each chapter of "Case Studies in Operations Research: Applications of Optimal Decision Making" also includes additional data provided on the book’s website on Springer.com. These files contain a brief description of the area of application, the problem and the required outputs. Also provided are links to access all the data in the problem. Finally there are project exercises for students to practice what they have learnt in the chapter, which can also be used by instructors as project assignments in their courses.

In both rich and poor nations, public resources for health care are inadequate to meet demand. Policy makers and health care providers must determine how to provide the most effective health care to citizens using the limited resources that are available. This chapter describes current and future challenges in the delivery of health care, and outlines the role that operations research (OR) models can play in helping to solve those problems. The chapter concludes with an overview of this book – its intended audience, the areas covered, and a description of the subsequent chapters. KEY WORDS Health care delivery, Health care planning HEALTH CARE DELIVERY: PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES 3 1.1 WORLDWIDE HEALTH: THE PAST 50 YEARS Human health has improved significantly in the last 50 years. In 1950, global life expectancy was 46 years [1]. That figure rose to 61 years by 1980 and to 67 years by 1998 [2]. Much of these gains occurred in low- and middle-income countries, and were due in large part to improved nutrition and sanitation, medical innovations, and improvements in public health infrastructure.

This book includes case studies that examine the application of operations research to improve or increase efficiency in industry and operational activities. This collection of “living case studies” is all based on the author’s 30-year career of consulting and advisory work. These true-to life industrial applications illustrate the research and development of solutions, as well as potential implementation and integration problems that may occur when adopting these methods into a business. Among the topics covered in the chapters include optimization in circuit board manufacturing, Decision Support System (DSS) for plant loading and dispatch planning, as well as development of important test procedures for tyre and pharma industry with shelf life constraints. In particular, the study on deckle optimization should be of great help to managers in paper industry and consultants for development of deckle optimization software. The application of operations research throughout the industry makes it an ideal guide for industrial executives, professionals and practitioners responsible for quality and productivity improvement.