Operational Research (O.R.) case studies

What’s the problem?

You are a manager in a school… You are particularly concerned about evacuating the children from the two canteens You are planning fire evacuation procedures

You want to get all the children out of the buildings in 2 minutes But there are several small doorways they need to go through to get outside

At the busiest time there are 550 children in the two canteens Is it possible to get them all out in time?

What do we need? A plan of the buildings

Something like this… Outside Area 1 Outside Area 2 Outside Area 3 Canteen 1 Canteen 2 A B C D

and information about the capacity of each doorway (how quickly we can get the children through safely)

Then we are ready to consider how long it will take to get the children out

Let’s summarise the problem We need to evacuate 550 children from the school canteens We need the children to pass safely through a series of doorways with limited capacity

Is it possible to get all the children out in two minutes?

This is an example of finding the maximum flow through a network

Other examples of where this might be used - Pipelines (oil, gas, water) - Transport networks - Delivery or distribution systems

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