Operations Research (4): Capstone Project

Course Description Operations Research (OR) is a field in which people use mathematical and engineering methods to study optimization problems in Business and Management, Economics, Computer Science, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, etc. The series of courses consists of four parts, we focus on deterministic optimization techniques, which is a major part of the field of OR. As the fourth part of the series, we invite students to do a capstone project by utilizing everything she/he learned in the first three parts to conduct an OR study. We will give examples about good and bad OR studies and talk more about the what and why of OR studies. Course Objectives The objective of the course is for students to combine the knowledge about applications, modeling, algorithms, and theories. Upon successful completion of this course, students will gain the experience of applying OR techniques to solve real-world problems, including identifying a problem that is appropriate for OR, formulating a problem as a mathematical program, solving the mathematical program with a solver, designing a heuristic algorithm, evaluating the performance of the heuristic algorithm, and draw conclusions for managerial decision makers.