An Exercise for Improving the Modeling Abilities of Students in an Operations Research Course
Leonardo Bedoya-Valencia, Nebojsa Jaksic · 2020
An exercise for improving skills of Operations Research (OR) students in formulating optimization problems is developed and implemented.The pilot experiment, as described by Chelst and Edwards (2005), is called the Lego® furniture.In this experiment, a furniture company has two types of resources available: small and large pieces; and produces two types of products: tables and chairs.Industrial Engineering students at the bachelor and master level were given the Lego ® furniture problem to formulate as an optimization problem defined by the decision variables, the objective function, and a set of constraints.This exercise serves as an introduction to the OR course.It complements lectures, seminars, and case studies used in this type of courses.The exercise is intended to produce formulation-of-the-problem attitude among the students.The results presented in this work show an improvement in student modeling abilities as well as high student satisfaction with the described experiment.Master level students, already exposed to the concepts of modeling and optimization, were slightly less satisfied than bachelor level students that have never been exposed to the same concepts.Both, master and bachelor level students showed an improvement in their modeling abilities. JustificationMorse and Kimball (1951) 1 defined Operations Research (OR) as "a scientific method of providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions regarding the operations under their control".OR follows a scientific approach to analyze problems and to support any decision making process.OR professionals seek to understand the structure of complex situations, use this understanding to develop appropriate mathematical models, and then use them to improve the system performance.Hillier and Lieberman (2001) 2 summarized the usual phases of an OR study as the following: