The only required materials for the class is the course reader. This includes copies of chapters from the textbook, Applied Mathematical Programming, by Bradley, Hax and Magnanti (Addison-Wesley, 1977). (Note: one of the authors is Tom Magnanti, who is the Dean of Engineering at MIT.) This textbook is out of print, and we have made copies of the chapters that we will be using. Additional materials including course notes, readings and case studies will be handed out in class. Spreadsheets will be made available on the course web site. All of the spreadsheets require Excel, and many of the spreadsheets require Excel Solver. If you have Excel, but do not have Excel Solver, please have it installed immediately. (Do a find on "solver" first to see if it is on your disk already.)
This book requires a fairly high level of mathematical sophistication, which sometimes leads to slower reading. We recommend reading the book when you also have access to a computer, because we have included spreadsheets that complement the book's teachings. We have included a handout entitled "Textbook auxiliary material and errata" which you can locate at the class website.
If you believe that you have found an error in the book that is not listed on the course website, please send an E-mail to Professor Orlin.
Optional reference books include:
- W. Winston, Operations Research; Applications and Algorithms, Duxbury Press, 1995.
- Bertsimas D. and Tsitsiklis, J. Introduction to Linear Optimization, Athena Scientific, 1997.
- Ahuja, R., Magnanti, T. and Orlin, J. Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms and Applications, Prentice Hall, 1993.