This is an open textbook from TU Delft University of Technology. It provides an overview of several Operations Research (OR) models that have a strong relevance for engineering problems and can be the basis for other extensions.
The book is designed to guide readers through a journey that starts with basic mathematical foundations, continues to the modeling recipe to properly define mathematical models and how to solve them, and finishes with a broad overview of models that reflect real-world operations.
Code for the examples is available in a GitHub respository. The code uses the Pyomo and gurobipy Python libraries.
Sections:
- Part I. Introduces the concepts of OR and serious games and gamification and justifies why such concepts were embedded into this education tool.
- Part II. Provides readers with a recap on vector and matrix notation, which is key to the mathematical modeling covered in this book, and with an overview of the ingredients of a mathematical model and of how to set up one.
- Part III. Builds on the previous one and covers the main solution methods that can be employed to solve a mathematical model.
- Part IV. Focuses on a first set of mathematical models, i.e., assignment problems, whose main goal is to determine how to properly assign items to resources.
- Part V. Focuses on network problems, where the goal is to efficiently route resources in a pre-defined environment (the network).
- Part VI. Presents an example of a modeling framework that accounts for uncertainty.
Textbook: From theORy to application: learning to optimize with Operations Research in an interactive way.
GitHub: Respository.
