ISE Introduction to Operations Research 11th Edition
Genres: Science Engineering
Book Preface
When Jerry Lieberman and I started working on the first edition of this book, our goal was to develop a pathbreaking textbook that would help establish the future direction of education in what was then the emerging field of operations research. Following publication, it was unclear how well this particular goal was met, but what did become clear was that the demand for the book was far larger than either of us had anticipated. Neither of us could have imagined that this extensive worldwide demand would continue at such a high level for such an extended period of time.
The enthusiastic response to our first ten editions has been most gratifying. It was a particular pleasure to have the field’s leading professional society, the international Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), award the 6th edition honorable mention for the 1995 INFORMS Lanchester Prize (the prize awarded for the year’s most outstanding English-language publication of any kind in the field of operations research).
Then, just after the publication of the eighth edition, it was especially gratifying to be the recipient of the prestigious 2004 INFORMS Expository Writing Award for this book, including receiving the following citation:
Over 37 years, successive editions of this book have introduced more than one-half million students to the field and have attracted many people to enter the field for academic activity and professional practice. Many leaders in the field and many current instructors first learned about the field via an edition of this book. The extensive use of international student editions and translations into 15 other languages has contributed to spreading the field around the world. The book remains preeminent even after 37 years. Although the eighth edition just appeared, the seventh edition had 46 percent of the market for books of its kind, and it ranked second in international sales among all McGraw-Hill publications in engineering.
Two features account for this success. First, the editions have been outstanding from students’ points of view due to excellent motivation, clear and intuitive explanations, good examples of professional practice, excellent organization of material, very useful supporting software, and appropriate but not excessive mathematics. Second, the editions have been attractive from instructors’ points of view because they repeatedly infuse state-of-the-art material with remarkable lucidity and plain language. For example, a wonderful chapter on metaheuristics was created for the eighth edition.
When we began work on the first edition, Jerry already was a prominent member of the field, a successful textbook writer, and the chairman of a renowned operations research program at Stanford University. I was a very young assistant professor just starting my career. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to work with and to learn from the master. I will be forever indebted to Jerry for giving me this opportunity.
Now, sadly, Jerry is no longer with us. During the progressive illness that led to his death in 1999, I resolved that I would pick up the torch and devote myself to subsequent editions of this book, maintaining a standard that would fully honor Jerry. Therefore, I took early retirement from my faculty responsibilities at Stanford in order to work full time on textbook writing for the foreseeable future. This has enabled Page xxime to spend far more than the usual amount of time in preparing each new edition. It also has enabled me to closely monitor new trends and developments in the field in order to bring this edition completely up to date. This monitoring has led to the addition of a considerable number of important topics to recent editions of the book.
The field continues to evolve fairly rapidly. The most important of the recent developments has been the rise of analytics as a very important complement to operations research. Other important trends also are under way. Therefore, I have made a special effort with this edition to continue bringing this book fully into the 21st century. The many major additions to the new edition are outlined below.
□ WHAT’S NEW IN THIS EDITION
- Added a New Section 1.3: The Relationship between Analytics and Operations Research.
- Added a New Section 1.5: Some Trends That Should Further Increase the Future Impact of Operations Research.
- Added a New Section 2.2: Gathering and Organizing Relevant Data.
- Added a New Section 2.3: Using Descriptive Analytics to Analyze Big Data.
- Added a New Section 2.4: Using Predictive Analytics to Analyze Big Data.
- Reorganized Section 4.6 (Adapting the Simplex Method to Nonstandard Forms) into Three New Shorter Sections.
- Section 4.10: Added Up-To-Date information on the Factors Affecting the Speed of the Simplex Method (and Its Variants).
- Section 4.11: Added Up-To-Date Information on the Factors Affecting the Relative Performance of the Simplex Method and Interior-Point Algorithms.
- Shortened and Revised Section 12.3: Using Binary Variables to Deal with Fixed Charges.
- Shortened and Revised Section 12.4: A Binary Representation of General Integer Variables.
- Added a New Section 16.7: Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis, Including Goal Programming.
- Added a New Section 17.11: Behavioral Queueing Theory.
- Added a New Section 19.4: Markov Decision Processes in Practice.
- Added a New Section 20.5: Simulation Optimization.
- Added many New Smaller Updates, Including New Application Vignettes and New Selected References.
Reductions to Make Room for All These New Additions:
The first edition of this book was only a little over 600 pages. However, subsequent editions kept growing until it reached 1200 pages with the 7th edition. That is much too large for an introductory textbook, so I have been working ever since to decrease the size of each new edition. I finally got the 10th edition down below 1000 pages again (excluding indices and front matter) and have made a real effort to reduce the size a little further with this new edition. This was a real challenge with all of the new additions outlined above. However, I feel that the reductions listed below have helped to make this a better book by enabling more focus on the important material.
- Dropped Analytic Solver Platform for Education. (This is an excellent software package, but Frontline Systems now is charging students to use it and reviewers expressed little interest in retaining it. This one reduction saved approximately 35 pages.)
- Eliminated an Overabundance of Linear Programming Formulation Examples in Section 3.4. (Dropping three of the six complicated examples saved 1 0 pages.)Page xxii
- Shifted Section 6.2 (Economic Interpretation of Duality) to a Supplement on the Website.
- Shifted the General Procedure for Constructing an Initial BF Solution for the Transportation Simplex Method in Section 9.2 to a Supplement on the Website.
- Shifted Most of Section 12.3 (Innovative Uses of Binary Variables in Model Formulation) and Section 12.4 (Some Formulation Examples) to a Supplement on the Website, While Retaining More Elementary Material.
- Deleted a Subsection in Section 17.3 on Outdated Award-Winning Studies That Applied Queueing Theory.
- Deleted 14 Outdated Application Vignettes (While Also Adding 11 New Ones That Are Very Up to Date) and Also Deleted Several Pages of Citations of Outdated Award-Winning OR Applications.
□ OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES OF THIS BOOK
- An Emphasis on Real Applications. The field of operations research is continuing to have a dramatic impact on the success of numerous companies and organizations around the world. Therefore, one of the goals of this book is to tell this story clearly and thereby excite students about the great relevance of the material they are studying. One way this goal is pursued is by including many realistic cases patterned after real applications at the end of chapters and on the book’s website. Another way is the inclusion of many application vignettes scattered throughout the book that describe in a few paragraphs how an actual award-winning application of operations research had a powerful impact on a company or organization by using techniques like those studied in that portion of the book. For each application vignette, a problem also is included in the problems section of that chapter that requires the student to read the full article describing the application and then answer some questions. (The only application vignette that lacks this full article is the one in Chapter 1.) The next bullet point describes how students have immediate access to these articles.
- Links to Many Articles Describing Dramatic OR Applications. We are excited about a partnership with The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), our field’s preeminent professional society, to provide a link on this book’s website to each of the articles that fully describes the application that is summarized in one of the application vignettes. All of these articles appeared in an INFORMS journal called Interfaces (now retitled INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics starting in 2019). (Information about INFORMS journals, meetings, job bank, scholarships, awards, and teaching materials is at www.informs.org.) These articles and the corresponding end-of-chapter problems provide instructors with the option of having their students delve into real applications that dramatically demonstrate the relevance of the material being covered in the lectures. It would even be possible to devote significant course time to discussing real applications.
- A Wealth of Supplementary Chapters and Sections on the Website. In addition to the nearly 1,000 pages in this book, another several hundred pages of supplementary material also are provided on this book’s website (as outlined in the table of contents). This includes eight complete chapters, 12 supplements to chapters in the book, and dozens of additional cases. Most of the supplementary chapters include problems and selected references. Most of the supplements to chapters also have Page xxiiiproblems. Today, when students think nothing of accessing material electronically, instructors should feel free to include some of this supplementary material in their courses.
- Many Additional Examples Are Available. An especially important learning aid on the book’s website is a set of Solved Examples for almost every chapter in the book. We believe that most students will find the examples in the book fully adequate but that others will feel the need to go through additional examples. These solved examples on the website will provide the latter category of students the needed help, but without interrupting the flow of the material in the book on those many occasions when most students don’t need to see an additional example. Many students also might find these additional examples helpful when preparing for an examination. We recommend to instructors that they point out this important learning aid to their students.
- Great Flexibility for What to Emphasize. We have found that there is great variability in what instructors want to emphasize in an introductory OR survey course. They might want to emphasize the mathematics and algorithms of operations research. Others will emphasize model formulation with little concern for the details of the algorithms needed to solve these models. Others want an even more applied course, with emphasis on applications and the role of OR in managerial decision making. Some instructors will focus on the deterministic models of OR, while others will emphasize stochastic models. There also are great differences in the kind of software (if any) that instructors want their students to use. All of this helps to explain why the book is a relatively large one. We believe that we have provided enough material to meet the needs of all of these kinds of instructors. Furthermore, the book is organized in such a way that it is relatively easy to pick and choose the desired material without loss of continuity. It even is possible to provide great flexibility on the kind of software (if any) that instructors want their students to use, as described below in the section on software options.
- A Customizable Version of the Text Also is Available. Because the text provides great flexibility for what to emphasize, an instructor can easily pick and choose just certain portions of the book to cover. Rather than covering most of the pages in the book, perhaps you wish to use only a much smaller portion of the text. Fortunately, McGraw-Hill provides an option for using a considerably smaller and less expensive version of the book that is customized to meet your needs. With McGraw-Hill Create™, you can include only the chapters you want to cover. You also can easily rearrange chapters, combine material from other content sources, and quickly upload content you have written, like your course syllabus or teaching notes. If desired, you can use Create to search for useful supplementary material in various other leading McGraw-Hill textbooks. For example, if you wish to emphasize spreadsheet modeling and applications, we would recommend including some chapters from the Hillier-Hillier textbook, Introduction to Management Science: A Modeling and Case Studies Approach with Spreadsheets. (That textbook includes a complete coverage of the Analytic Solver Platform for Education software package that has been dropped in this edition.) Arrange your book to fit your teaching style. Create even allows you to personalize your book’s appearance by selecting the cover and adding your name, school, and course information. Order a Create book and you’ll receive a complimentary print review copy in 3–5 business days or a complimentary electronic review copy (eComp) via e-mail in minutes. You can go to www.mcgrawhillcreate.com and register to experience how McGraw-Hill Create empowers you to teach your students your way.
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□ A WEALTH OF SOFTWARE OPTIONS
A wealth of software options is provided on the book’s website www.mhhe.com/hillier11e as outlined below:
- Excel spreadsheets: state-of-the-art spreadsheet formulations in Excel files for all relevant examples throughout the book. The standard Excel Solver can solve all of these examples.
- A number of Excel templates for solving basic models.
- Student versions of LINDO (a traditional optimizer) and LINGO (a popular algebraic modeling language), along with formulations and solutions for all relevant examples throughout the book.
- Student versions of MPL (a leading algebraic modeling language) along with an MPL Tutorial and MPL formulations and solutions for all relevant examples throughout the book.
- Student versions of several elite MPL solvers for linear programming, integer programming, convex programming, global optimization, etc.
- Queueing Simulator (for the simulation of queueing systems).
- OR Tutor for illustrating various algorithms in action.
- Interactive Operations Research (IOR) Tutorial for efficiently learning and executing algorithms interactively, implemented in Java 2 in order to be platform independent.
Numerous students have found OR Tutor and IOR Tutorial very helpful for learning various OR algorithms. When moving to the next stage of solving OR models automatically, surveys have found instructors almost equally split in preferring one of the following options for their students’ use: (1) Excel spreadsheets, including Excel’s Solver, (2) convenient traditional software (LINDO and LINGO), and (3) other state-of-the-art OR software (MPL and its elite solvers). For this edition, therefore, I have retained the philosophy of the last few editions of providing enough introduction in the book to enable the basic use of any of the three options without distracting those using another, while also providing ample supporting material for each option on the book’s website.
There are only two software packages that accompanied the 10th edition that are not continued with this new edition. One is the Analytic Solver Platform for Education (ASPE) previously discussed in Sec. 3.5 and several subsequent places. The other is the TreePlan software for decision trees that was described in a supplement to Chapter 16. Our policy is that students must be able to use all the software provided with the book for their course work without any additional charge, but the owners of these two packages now are charging students for their use.
Additional Online Resources
- A glossary for every book chapter.
- Data files for various cases to enable students to focus on analysis rather than inputting large data sets.
- A test bank featuring moderately difficult questions that require students to show their work is being provided to instructors. Many of the questions in this test bank have previously been used successfully as test questions by the authors.
- A solutions manual and image files for instructors.
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□ THE USE OF THE BOOK
The overall thrust of all the revision efforts has been to build upon the strengths of previous editions to more fully meet the needs of today’s students. These revisions make the book even more suitable for use in a modern course that reflects contemporary practice in the field. The use of software is integral to the practice of operations research, so the wealth of software options accompanying the book provides great flexibility to the instructor in choosing the preferred types of software for student use. All the educational resources accompanying the book further enhance the learning experience. Therefore, the book and its website should fit a course where the instructor wants the students to have a single self-contained textbook that complements and supports what happens in the classroom.
The McGraw-Hill editorial team and I think that the net effect of the revision has been to make this edition even more of a “student’s book”—clear, interesting, and well-organized with lots of helpful examples and illustrations, good motivation and perspective, easy-to-find important material, and enjoyable homework, without too much notation, terminology, and dense mathematics. We believe and trust that the numerous instructors who have used previous editions will agree that this is the best edition yet.
The prerequisites for a course using this book can be relatively modest. As with previous editions, the mathematics has been kept at a relatively elementary level. Most of Chaps. 1 to 15 (introduction, linear programming, and mathematical programming) require no mathematics beyond high school algebra. Calculus is used only in Chap. 13 (Nonlinear Programming) and in one example in Chap. 11 (Dynamic Programming). Matrix notation is used in Chap. 5 (The Theory of the Simplex Method), Chap. 6 (Duality Theory), Chap. 7 (Linear Programming under Uncertainty), Sec. 8.4 (An Interior-Point Algorithm), and Chap. 13, but the only background needed for this is presented in Appendix 4. For Chaps. 16 to 20 (probabilistic models), a previous introduction to probability theory is assumed, and calculus is used in a few places. In general terms, the mathematical maturity that a student achieves through taking an elementary calculus course is useful throughout Chaps. 16 to 20 and for the more advanced material in the preceding chapters.
The content of the book is aimed largely at the upper-division undergraduate level (including well-prepared sophomores) and at first-year (master’s level) graduate students. Because of the book’s great flexibility, there are many ways to package the material into a course. Chapters 1 and 2 give an introduction to the subject of operations research. Chapters 3 to 15 (on linear programming and mathematical programming) may essentially be covered independently of Chaps. 16 to 20 (on probabilistic models), and vice-versa. Furthermore, the individual chapters among Chaps. 3 to 15 are almost independent, except that they all use basic material presented in Chap. 3 and perhaps in Chap. 4. Parts of Chapters 5-8 are a little more challenging mathematically than the prior chapters. Chapters 6 and 7 and Sec. 8.2 draw upon Chap. 5. Secs. 8.1 and 8.2 use parts of Chaps. 6 and 7. Section 10.6 assumes an acquaintance with the problem formulations in Secs. 9.1 and 9.3, while prior exposure to Secs. 8.3 and 9.2 is helpful (but not essential) in Sec. 10.7. Within Chaps. 16 to 20, there is considerable flexibility of coverage, although some integration of the material is available.
An elementary survey course covering linear programming, mathematical programming, and some probabilistic models can be presented in a quarter (40 hours) or semester by selectively drawing from material throughout the book. For example, a good survey of the field can be obtained from Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 16, 17, 18, and 20, along Page xxviwith parts of Chaps. 10 to 14. A more extensive elementary survey course can be completed in two quarters (60 to 80 hours) by excluding just a few chapters, for example, Chaps. 8, 15, and 19. Chapters 1 to 9 (and perhaps part of Chap. 10) form an excellent basis for a (one-quarter) course in linear programming. The material in Chaps. 10 to 15 covers topics for another (one-quarter) course in other deterministic models. Finally, the material in Chaps. 16 to 20 covers the probabilistic (stochastic) models of operations research suitable for presentation in a (one-quarter) course. In fact, these latter three courses (the material in the entire text) can be viewed as a basic one-year sequence in the techniques of operations research, forming the core of a master’s degree program.
The book’s website will provide any updates about the book, including an errata. To access this site, visit www.mhhe.com/hillier11e.
□ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to an excellent group of reviewers who provided sage advice for the revi sion process. This group included
Baski Balasundaram, Oklahoma State University
Gajanan Hegde, University of Pittsburgh
Ron McGarvey, University of Missouri
Emanuel Melachrinoudis, Northeastern University
Steven Slava Krigman, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and Boston University Department of Mathematics
Eli Olinick, Southern Methodist University
Teresa Zigh, Stevens Institute of Technology
In addition, thanks go to those instructors and students who sent email messages to provide their feedback on the 10th edition. Special thanks go to Andrew Denard, a student who found a considerable number of typos for me.
I am particularly grateful to three friends who provided expert advice on specific topics for this edition. I have known all of them well since they were students (and eventually PhD graduates) at Stanford a few decades ago, and all three have gone on to illustrious careers in the field. One is Irv Lustig, who currently is an Optimization principal with Princeton Consultants. Irv is well known as being on the leading edge of current developments at the interface between theory and practice, including in the area of analytics. A second is Vijay Mehrotra, a faculty member at the University of San Francisco who is a regular columnist for the Analytics magazine. The third is Edward Rothberg, who is the CEO and a leading computational scientist for GUROBI, a particularly prominent OR software company. Irv and Vijay guided me through the process of developing the four new up-to-date sections on analytics in the first two chapters. Ed identified the current state of the art for me regarding the factors affecting the speed of the simplex method (and its variants), as well as the factors affecting the relative performance of the simplex method and interior-point algorithms. This provided authoritative updates for Secs. 4.10 and 4.11.
I also am very fortunate to have a strong team who contributed to recent editions in ways that supported the current edition as well. Our case writers, Karl Schmedders and Molly Stephens (both graduates of our department), wrote 24 elaborate cases for the 7th edition, and all of these cases continue to accompany this new edition. One of our department’s former PhD students, Michael O’Sullivan, developed OR Tutor for the 7th edition (and continued here), based on part of the software that my son Mark Hillier had developed for the 5th and 6th editions. Mark (who was born the same year as the first edition, earned his PhD at Stanford, and now is a tenured Associate Professor of Page xxviiQuantitative Methods at the University of Washington) provided both the spreadsheets and the Excel files (including many Excel templates) once again for this edition, as well as the Queueing Simulator. He also contributed greatly to Chap. 21 on the book’s website. In addition, he updated both the 10th edition and the current 11th edition versions of the solutions manual. Earlier editions of this solutions manual were prepared in an exemplary manner by a long sequence of PhD students from our department, including Che-Lin Su for the 8th edition and Pelin Canbolat for the 9th edition. Che-Lin and Pelin did outstanding work that nicely paved the way for Mark’s work on the solutions manual. Last, but definitely not least, my dear wife, Ann Hillier (another Stanford graduate with a minor in operations research), provided me with important help on a regular basis. All the individuals named above were vital members of the team.
I also owe a great debt of gratitude to three individuals and their companies for providing the special software and related information for the book. Another Stanford PhD graduate, William Sun (CEO of the software company Accelet Corporation), and his team did a brilliant job of starting with much of Mark Hillier’s earlier software and implementing it anew in Java 2 as IOR Tutorial for the 7th edition, as well as further enhancing IOR Tutorial for the subsequent editions. Linus Schrage of the University of Chicago and the head of LINDO Systems (and my former faculty colleague at Stanford) has again provided LINGO and LINDO for the book’s website. He also supervised the further development of LINGO/LINDO files for the various chapters as well as providing tutorial material for the book’s website. Another long-time friend, Bjarni Kristjansson (who heads Maximal Software), did the same thing for the MPL/Solvers files and MPL tutorial material, as well as arranging to provide a student version of MPL and various elite solvers for the book’s website. These three individuals and their companies—Accelet Corporation, LINDO Systems, and Maximal Software—have made an invaluable contribution to this book.
I also am excited about the partnership with INFORMS that began with the 9th edition. Students can benefit greatly by reading about top-quality applications of operations research. This preeminent professional OR society is enabling this by providing a link to the articles in Interfaces (now called INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics) that describe the applications of OR that are summarized in the application vignettes provided in the book.
It was a real pleasure working with McGraw-Hill’s thoroughly professional editorial and production staff, including Theresa Collins (the Product Developer during most of the development of this edition), and Jason Stauter (Content Project Manager).
Just as so many individuals made important contributions to this edition, I would like to invite each of you to start contributing to the next edition by using my email address below to send me your comments, suggestions, and errata to help me improve the book in the future. In giving my email address, let me also assure instructors that I will continue to follow the policy of not providing solutions to problems and cases in the book to anybody (including your students) who contacts me.
Enjoy the book.
Frederick S. Hillier
Stanford University ([email protected])
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