Contents of Bachelor courses
For our Bachelor courses, you subsequently find a short description which can help you to assess the topics to be covered in the respective courses. For courses with a limited number of participants, the application details are published on the respective course website approximately 2 months before course begin.
The assignment of the courses to the 4 OR Bachelor modules
- Introduction to Operations Research (Coordinator: Prof. Nickel, Prof. Stein, Prof. Rebennack)
- Applications of Operations Research (Coordinator: Prof. Nickel)
- Methodic Foundations of Operations Research (Coordinator: Prof. Stein)
- Optimization under Uncertainty (Coordinator: Prof. Rebennack)
can be looked up in the Bachelor course offer of the IOR.
Facility Location and Strategic Supply Chain Management
Since the classical work "Theory of the Location of Industries" of Weber from 1909, the determination of an optimal location of a new facility with respect to existing customers is strongly connected to strategical logistics planning. Strategic decisions concerning the location of facilities as production plants, distribution centers or warehouses are of high importance for the rentability of supply chains. Thoroughly carried out, location planning allows an efficient flow of materials and leads to lower costs and increased customer service.
Subject of the course is an introduction to the most important terms and definitions in location planning as well as the presentation of basic quantitative location planning models. Furthermore, specialized location planning models for Supply Chain Management will be addressed as they are part in many commercial SCM tools for strategic planning tasks.
Tactical and Operational Supply Chain Management
The planning of material transport is an essential element of Supply Chain Management. By linking transport connections across different facilities, the material source (production plant) is connected with the material sink (customer). The general supply task can be formulated as follows (cf. Gudehus): For given material flows or shipments, choose the optimal (in terms of minimal costs) distribution and transportation chain from the set of possible logistics chains, which asserts the compliance of delivery times and further constraints. The main goal of the inventory management is the optimal determination of order quantities in terms of minimization of fixed and variable costs subject to resource constraints, supply availability and service level requirements. Similarly, the problem of lot sizing in production considers the determination of the optimal amount of products to be produced in a time slot. The course includes an introduction to basic terms and definitions of Supply Chain Management and a presentation of fundamental quantitative planning models for distribution, vehicle routing, inventory management and lot sizing. Furthermore, case studies from practice will be discussed in detail.
Modeling and OR Software: Introduction (limited number of participants)
After an introduction to general concepts of modelling tools (implementation, data handling, result interpretation, …), the software IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio and the corresponding modeling language OPL will be discussed which can be used to solve OR problems on a computer-aided basis. Subsequently, a broad range of exercises will be discussed. The main goals of the exercises from literature and practical applications are to learn the process of modeling optimization problems as linear or mixed-integer programs, to efficiently utilize the presented tools for solving these optimization problems and to implement heuristic solution procedures for mixed-integer programs.