Introduction to Management Science, 9th Edition.pdf

Introduction to Management Science, 9th Edition

The objective of management science is to solve the decision-making problems that confront and
confound managers in both the public and the private sector by developing mathematical models of those
problems. These models have traditionally been solved with various mathematical techniques, all of
which lend themselves to specific types of problems. Thus, management science as a field of study has
always been inherently mathematical in nature, and as a result sometimes complex and rigorous. When I
began writing the first edition of this book in 1979, my main goal was to make these mathematical topics
seem less complex and thus more palatable to undergraduate business students. To achieve this goal I
started out by trying to provide simple, straightforward explanations of often difficult mathematical topics. I
tried to use lots of examples that demonstrated in detail the fundamental mathematical steps of the
modeling and solution techniques. Although in the last two and a half decades the emphasis in
management science has shifted away from strictly mathematical to mostly computer solutions, my
objective has not changed. I have provided clear, concise explanations of the techniques used in
management science to model problems, and provided lots of examples of how to solve these models on
the computer, while still including some of the fundamental mathematics of the techniques.