One of the primary purposes of any model is to build intuition and generate insights. Typically, a model is developed to be able to better understand phenomena that are otherwise difficult to comprehend. Models can also help in verifying the correctness of an intuition or judgment. In spite of the fact that many educators and practitioners recognize the intuition-building power of simple models, this is the first book in the field that uses the power of the basic models and principles to provide students and managers with an "intuitive understanding" of operations management.

SUPPLY CHAIN ANALYSIS: A Handbook on the Interaction of Information, System, and Optimization is a carefully developed work focused on the analysis of supply chain interaction issues in emerging markets and industry sectors. It is a leading-edge handbook that will emphasize where little work has been done and where the "rubber meets the road" -- the supply chain process, information, and systems integration. These are pertinent issues facing practitioners and researchers in today's business environment.

This is a gap-bridging handbook that analyzes...

Constrained optimization models are core tools in business, science, government, and the military with applications including airline scheduling, control of petroleum refining operations, investment decisions, and many others. Constrained optimization models have grown immensely in scale and complexity in recent years as inexpensive computing power has become widely available. Models now frequently have many complicated interacting constraints, giving rise to a host of issues related to feasibility and infeasibility. For example, it is sometimes difficult to find any feasible point at all...

Around the world, liberalization and privatization in the electricity industry have lead to increased competition among utilities. At the same time, utilities are now exposed more than ever to risk and uncertainties, which they cannot pass on to their customers through price increases as in a regulated environment. Especially electricity-generating companies have to face volatile wholesale prices, fuel price uncertainty, limited long-term hedging possibilities and huge, to a large extent, sunk investments.

In this context, Uncertainty in the Electric Power Industry: Methods...

Paul Williams, a leading authority on modeling in integer programming, has written a concise, readable introduction to the science and art of using modeling in logic for integer programming. Written for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics and practitioners, the book is divided into four chapters that all avoid the typical format of definitions, theorems and proofs and instead introduce concepts and results within the text through examples. References are given at the end of each chapter to the more mathematical papers and texts on the subject, and exercises are...

An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research An Informal History recounts the evolution of Operations Research (OR) as a new science - the science of decision making. Arising from the urgent operational issues of World War II, the philosophy and methodology of OR has permeated the resolution of decision problems in business, industry, and government. The Timeline chronicles the history of OR in the form of self-contained, expository entries. Each entry presents a concise explanation of the events and people under discussion, and provides key sources where further...

Combat Modeling is a systematic learning resource and reference text for the quantitative analysis of combat. After a brief overview, authors Washburn and Kress present individual chapters on shooting without feedback; shooting with feedback; target defense; attrition models; game theory and wargames; search; unmanned aerial vehicles; and terror and insurgency. Three appendices provide a review of basic probability concepts, probability distributions, and Markov models; an introduction to optimization models; and a discussion of Monte-Carlo simulations. This is a book that can be...