Module overview
Organisations are typically faced with many decision problems in the running of their operations and they strive to make better decisions by finding good, or ideally the best (optimal), solutions to such problems. This module is concerned with how decision problems can be formulated mathematically and solved optimally to support the decision making process in organisations. The module will introduce several optimisation techniques and illustrate the application of these techniques on problems from different types of industries.
The techniques introduced in this module have a wide range of applicability on decision problems arising in, among others, resource and workforce planning, business investment, machine scheduling, logistics, and supply chain management. The underlying methods of optimisation studied in this module, however, are generally applicable and not restricted to prescriptive analytics.