Teaching Overview

Human beings have a natural desire to do things as well as possible. And when there are several possibilities of doing something, they try to choose the best alternative they can afford. This desire requires two different skills: one needs to decide on the aspects of the real-world that are relevant for the problem context, to recast them in an abstract optimization model, to find an optimal solution to this model, and to reflect on the effects of the implementation process of this optimal solution in real-life. This procedure is embedded in a larger process that is called Operations Research (or System Design and Optimization). The second skill concerns the design of outstanding algorithms to solve such abstract optimization models arising from the modelling of real-life problems. The development of such algorithms, their complexity analysis, and their simulation is summarized under the name of Mathematical Optimization.

The Institute for Operations Research offers lectures, seminars, and student projects in both fields of Optimization: