In Network Analysis, an application is represented as a graph to be optimized. Network Analysis is a topic that is relatively different from the previously listed items. Therefore this is also a good question for optimization with Operations Research. For expensive items like machinery, cars, computers, etc there is a huge cost for a company when replacing them too late, but also when replacing them too early. Replacement problems are relatively comparable to the previous: optimizing the replacement of materials that are known to fail after a certain time of usage. I hope that at this point the types of problems treated in Operations Research are already getting clearer for you. If you want to go further into inventory management, you should definitely have a look into those. The most-used algorithms for Inventory Management are Economic Order Quantity (EOQ), Inventory Production Quantity (IPQ) and ABC Analysis. Inventory Control Systems regroup different solutions that solve the totality of an organization’s inventory tasks. Inventory Control for a company is complicated and depends on many decisions, for example, purchasing, warehousing, shipping, tracking and more, The next topic solved by Operations Research is Inventory Control. Once this is done, Queuing Theory allows a business to understand and improve queuing times for customers and at the same time workforce management.Īnother important application of Queuing theory is task scheduling by computer’s Operation Systems, although that’s quite far from the other applications discussed in this article. Maybe less obvious than the previous example, but a waiting line can just as well be described perfectly in mathematical terms. The second topic in Operations Research is Queuing Theory. Queuing theory: avoid long lines, but also avoid overstaffing.