Operational Research (O.R.) case studies

What’s the problem?

You are choosing your AS courses… You want to study AS Levels in Maths, Physics, French and Philosophy You also want to attend Basketball Club Each of these is available in one or more of 6 different option blocks

How do you decide if your combination of courses is possible?

And what to take in each option block?

Let’s summarise the problem We have a set of subjects and a set of option blocks with each subject available in one or more of the option blocks

We want to match up our chosen subjects with possible option blocks in a systematic way

This is an example of a Matchings Problem

Matchings Problems We have two distinct sets of vertices with some edges between the two sets but no edges within a set

We want to find as large as possible a subset of the edges with no two edges sharing a vertex

Another example where this is used British Airways scheduling staff: deciding who will work, when, and where…

Over the next few lessons, we will look at ways of approaching problems of this type… What next?