Course Description

Operations Research (OR) is a mathematical method which can be applied to various fields. OR is originated for military purposes. Nowadays, OR is put to practical use as one of the analysis tools for increasing the efficiency of daily essential processes such as production, materials and physical distributions in factories, and no large-scale projects are carried out without OR today. However there are many various techniques and fundamental techniques in OR that will be studied intensively in this class. Simple OR exercise problems using Microsoft Excel will be worked out in this class.This subject corresponds to the diploma policy DP3.

Course Objectives

According to the diploma policy DP3, students will be able to apply natural science, especially, the fundamental knowledge of mathematics, such as OR, to solve actual problems. In this class, we aim to understand fundamental techniques such as linear programming (LP) and queuing theory in OR. And we also aim to acquire the skill of calculating simple OR problems and the skill of making actual use of OR methods by using Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet program.

Grading Policy

Those who attend 10 or more lectures out of all 15 lectures will be given the qualifications of the regular examinations. The overall grade of this course will be decided based on the sum of total 100 points of the midterm exam (40 points), the final exam (40 points), and the score of exercises (20 points), and those whose grade is 60 or more will pass.
The score of exercises will be proportional to the number of the passed exercises submitted before each due date, and the maximum score of exercises is 20.
Doing the exercises includes using the Microsoft Excel's spreadsheet program. However, the midterm and final examinations do not require using the spreadsheet program. The two examinations require calculating the problems on paper at the lecture room without computers.
Feedback will be given right after the submission and the exercise will be corrected and returned in the offered session. Each final due date of the exercise is the date of the class a week later. No delay of submitting the exercises are allowed.
In principle, this course has no reexaminations.

Textbook and Reference

Requirements(Assignments)

For preparations of each class, students must read and organize the contents, and must go through the example questions in the relevant part of the related materials (about 1.0 hour).
For reviews of each class, students must do the exercises shown on LMS (about 2.0 hour).
You can not understand the methods of OR without handling them. It means that you can not obtain OR if you just listen to the lectures. Therefore, you will do training during class. Furthermore, you should try to do exercises by yourself using PCs or scientific calculators with referring the related materials on LMS. If you do, you will surely obtain OR.
You can use "Operations Research: an Active Learning Approach" in 4. References, that is an open resource for university education for self-learning materials, for the class 1 to class 10 in this course.

Note

The lectures and practices of this course will be conducted in a CL room.
LMS will be used for this course.
Students must prepare a scientific calculator without a communication function for doing the exercises and the regular examinations.
It is very important that you have a fundamental operation skill to use Excel for the most part of this course.
We will focus on the lectures and practices of the fundamental OR techniques in this course, therefore, you should be able to follow this course if you do not have a sense of difficulty to mathematics or calculating process. However, it is good having knowledge of probabilities studied in mathematical statistics to study queuing theory in the latter part of this course.
By the way, the fundamental techniques such as LP and queuing theory will be also questioned in IT Engineer Examinations.

Schedule