15.764 The Theory of Operations Management

Spring 2008 Course Announcement

January 30, 2008

Faculty

Retsef Levi, E53-389, 3-4155

Objectives

Operations Management (OM) is a broad area of research. It consists of traditional research trends such as inventory theory, which is one of the early and fundamental sub-areas of Operations Research, as well as recently emerging research trends like revenue management and healthcare management. The OM research literature is huge and spans more than 5 decades of an exciting blend of theory and applications and a broad range of research disciplines. In recent years there has been an increasing awareness among large corporations and academic institutes of the potential of high quality theoretical and applied OM research in improving fundamental business processes across many sectors. As a result the OM research community has been rapidly expanding, and there is a growing need for mathematically well-trained scholars that can conduct high-quality and innovative OM-related research.

The purpose of this course is to provide the students with a strong theoretical background of some of the fundamental aspects of OM. The course has three primary goals:

(i) Provide a rigorous treatment of the mathematical foundations underlying the theory of OM. We shall cover a broad collection of ‘old’ and state-of-the-art results in traditional application domains such as inventory management, supply chain management and logistics, as well as in new emerging application domains like revenue management and healthcare management.

(ii) Improve the students understanding of the fundamental modeling issues that arise in these domains and how the theoretical models connect to concrete applications. We will try to give the students ‘hands-on’ feel of how OM decisions are made in practice and why they are so complex.

(iii) Discuss teaching aspects of OM topics both at the PhD level and at the MBA level. We hope that this will help students to be better future teachers of OM courses.

Students who take the course should expect to get a broad perspective on many of the major theoretical results and mathematical techniques and disciplines underlying the OM academic research.

Format

Unlike previous years, this year the course will be lecture-based with weekly homework assignments like other PhD level courses offered within the PhD program of the Operations Research Center. The final grade will be based on homework assignments and class participation (no final exam).

Prerequisites

No previous background in OM is required. Students are expected to have taken “Introduction to Mathematical Programming” (6.251J/15.081J) and “Fundamentals of Probability” (6.975) or equivalent PhD level courses.