Optimization in operations research
The term operations research was coined during World War I, when the British military brought together a group of scientists to allocate insufficient resources (food, medicines, etc.) in the most effective way possible to different military operations. Therefore, the term implies optimization, which is maximizing or minimizing an objective function subject to constraints, often in complex problems and in high dimensions. Operations problems typically include planning work shifts or creating a schedule for large organizations, designing facilities for customers at a large store, choosing investments for available funds, supply chain management, and inventory management, all of which can be posed or formulated as mathematical problems with a collection of variables and their relationships.
In operations research, a business problem is mapped to a lower-level generic problem that is concise enough to be described in mathematical notations. These...
