The course will be highly interactive with individual and group assignments and with intensive computer practice. The students will be offered various problems and projects to work on during the semester. Some of the projects will involve the use of certain software packages, while some others will require coding. In addition, each of the students will be required to solve homework assignments, mostly programming tasks, and build a home page. Grading will be based on homeworks and projects.

The course will concentrate on OR modeling and problem solving with AMPL and MOSEL, mathematical modeling languages geared towards OR problems; on PERL to realize basic data structures and combinatorial algorithms; on C++ to develop basic routines, and interface with CPLEX and/or XPressMP; and on HTML, Javascript and CSS to develop home pages and interactive web-projects.

• Week 1. Basics of OR problem solving, including the analysis of problem description, specifications and data availability. Selecting and building the mathematical model. Choosing and/or designing the appropriate data structures and algorithms. Designing the system, including programs, data files, and output descriptions. Understanding the environment, the size of the project, the source of data, possible errors. Planning for testing and evaluation.
• Weeks 2-3. Project descriptions and assignments. Description of the general computing environment and the special software packages available for the students: Workstations and personal computers. The university network. Mailing and file transfers. Basics and interactive use of languages.
• Week 4. General considerations in program design evaluation: program development process, program organization, programming details, user interface, program evaluation, test problems: Randomly generated test problems vs. bench-mark problems available from data banks via INTERNET v.s real-life problems (if any).
• Weeks 5-11: Half of the time every week is spent on development reports of the project work. The other half of the time is devoted to special computational problems, evaluation and demonstartion of home work codes.
• Weeks 12-13: Final evaluation of project work. Reports on test problems, laboratory demonstrations.