INTRODUCTION
09/09/2013
Operational research has its origin in the Second World War. There was a group, called
“Bernal’s group” that help to the URSS to optimize the resources like how deep you need to
through a bomb in order to damage a submarine (Statistical analysis) , which materials do you
need to replace the air surveillance, make a location analysis to make use of the radars… After
that, with the peace, we had problems. Problems that involve health, education, coal and steel
extraction, railways construction… In order to solve this problems Bernal’s group make
mathematical analysis. Queuing theory, planning related techniques, simulation, long term
planning, linear programming, national planning (input/output tables = linear programming).
In 1970’s there was the middle age crisis, and they developed the systems theory. They analyze
the excess, and try to find the efficiency analysis DEA. There were other problems, like
conflict, when a firms wanted to acquire another firm, the plan maybe was not totally optimal to
both of the parts, was just optimal for one of them, so there were two techniques: operational
research for the community and soft operational research (that is the one related with the
firm example). Another example is the optimal destruction facilities; that is what is happening
with Syria and USA.
So operational research is the optimization of the resources that we have in the best efficient
way. And here we introduce the term classification methods: heuristics.
PIVOTAL REDUCTION METHOD
12/09/2013
In order to develop a good operational research, first of all we have to decide which variables
are going to be studied, so (1) Decision variables; After that we have to define the (2)
Constraints that are a set of simultaneous equations that have some restrictions, like to be
positive or a limited amount of product/raw material…; And finally, define the (3) objective,
that use to be maximize profits and minimize the costs.
Let imagine a situation in which we have the following set of constraints: