Many business problems involve flows through a network – transportation, stages of an industrial process, routing of data. Students taking this course learn to specify and implement optimization models that solve network problems (what is the shortest path through a network, what is the least cost way to route material through a network with multiple supply nodes and multiple demand nodes). Students also learn how to solve Integer Programming (IP) problems and Nonlinear Programming (NLP) problems. Spreadsheet-based software is used to specify and implement models.
Dr. Cliff Ragsdale
Cliff T. Ragsdale is Bank of America Professor of Business Information Technology at Virginia Tech. His primary research interests involve applications of quantitative modeling techniques to managerial decision making problems using microcomputers. Dr. Ragsdale has served as a consultant for a variety of organizations including General Mills, The World Bank, Frontline Systems, and Dominion Energy. His research has been published in Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, Operations Research Letters, Computers and Operations Research, OMEGA, Personal Financial Planning, Financial Services Review, Decision Support Systems, and a number of other scholarly journals. He is a Fellow of Dec...