MATH2140 is a Mathematics Level II course. See the course overview below.

Units of credit: 3

Prerequisites: MATH1032 Credit, or MATH1231 or MATH1241 or MATH1251.

Exclusions: MATH2160, MATH2180, ECON2208.

Cycle of offering: yearly in Semester 2.

Graduate attributes: this course will develop your problem-solving skills and sharpen your analytical skills. Part of the assessment will involve working in groups to tackle unfamiliar problems; teams will plan their project work and report their findings. You will develop skills in setting up and analysing operations research models as well as competence in the use of computer packages for solving operations-research problems.

More information: this recent course handout(pdf) contains information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus. (This pdf will usually be updated by the end of the first week of the semester.)

The Online Handbook entry contains up-to-date timetabling information.

If you are currently enrolled in MATH2140, you can log into the My eLearning Vista instance of this course.

Operations Research (sometimes referred to as Management Science) is the branch of mathematics concerned with decision making: how best to design and operate a system, usually under conditions requiring the allocation of scarce resources. Operations research is used in the calculation of financial portfolios, the deployment of military operations, the scheduling of airline traffic, the day-to-day operating of manufacturing plants and ports, to make capital expenditure decisions, and to develop strategic plans for mining operations over several decades. The real world throws up a whole range of problems that are mathematically challenging to solve; in this course you will learn tools that will allow you to tackle some of them.

This course will cover general operations research techniques such as linear programming (where decision variables are continuous), integer programming (where decisions are "yes/no"), and dynamic programming (where future decisions do not depend on past decisions). Specialised methods for transportation, assignment, and shortest-path problems will also be covered.