OR/MS Education

One might be heretical enough to question the advisability of offering formal educational programs in OR/MS; this thought occurred to me recently while preparing a final examination for an “Introduction to …” course I was teaching. Using the time-honored pedagogical device of copying questions from the exercises in texts other than the one being used in the course, I happened to pick up the first OR text I ever taught from; Sasieni, Yaspan, and Friedman's Operations Research: Methods and Problems, published by Wiley in 1959. Looking through the book reminded me of what I taught that class 20 years earlier: linear programming, dynamic programming, inventory models, scheduling, simulation, waiting lines, game theory, and reliability. The only topic not in that text that currently finds its way into OR/MS courses is PERT/CPM.