Optimization of Business Processes

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/X_400422

Course Objective

In this course students learn about applications of operations research in manufacturing and services, especially health care, call centers and revenue management. After this course the students:
- are familiar with some areas in which business process optimization techniques are used;
- are familiar with the most common optimization techniques and tools and knows how to apply them;
- understand the business context and is familiar with the most common pitfalls.

Course Content

We deal with a number of important application areas of optimization: production logistics/manufacturing, call centers, health care and revenue management. For each area we present quantitative problems and discuss how they can be solved using mathematical models, mostly forecasting, deterministic optimization and stochastic processes. We also discuss a number of new models. Students solve representative problems from the field in homework assignments, which include all steps from data to decision. Several guest lectures are given by people from industry.

Teaching Methods

Lectures and practical work.

Method of Assessment

Written examination, 3 individual assignments in R or python, and a book presentation. The assignments and the presentation each count for 10%, the exam for 60%. The minimal grade for the exam is 5.0.

Literature

Lecture notes.

Target Audience

mBA, mBA-D, mMath

Recommended background knowledge

Applied Stochastic Modeling or equivalent knowledge