Monthly Archive: July 2012

7

OR and the Matrix

Well, as a Matrix fan, I thought if we are really in ‘the Matrix’ then there could be some changes in Operations Research. I would like to start with the question ‘What is the Matrix?’ for those who don’t know the...

4

On Content of Undergraduate Operations Research Courses

Today, one of professors in my department talked about content of two new courses of him. He is planning one graduate-level course and one undergraduate level. While describing the courses, he stated that the graduate one will focus on academic issues...

6

Some Recent Metaheuristics

After reading this blog post, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss some new metaheuristics inspired by nature. 1 – Spiral Optimization Developed by Keiichiro Yasuda and Kenichi Tamura in 2011. They approximated focused spiral phenomena to logarithmic...

6

Can OR Techniques be Derived by Imitating the Nature?

Initially, I would like to give the answer of this question. Yes, can be. Indeed, there is a derived word for this approach, Biomimetics, copying the nature or benefit from natural opportunities while deriving solutions to the problems. An instance in...

4

Football and Operations Research

Football -aka soccer, the European football- is one of the most popular sports in the world. By having ambitious and successful teams, numerous supporters and perhaps the first and foremost unbelievably high budgets, football should be in the interest of Operations...

2

First Instance of Duality in Nonlinear Programming

I always wondered “Why would someone try to construct a dual problem?” When I was doing research for my past blog post “Forgotten Scientists“, I accidentally found my answer. Kuhn says that duality should have these two elements: (a) a pair...