Operations Research is a vast branch of mathematics which encompasses many diverse areas of minimization and optimization. The central objective of operations research is optimization, that is, "to do things best under the given circumstances." This general concept has great many applications, for instance, in agricultural planning, biotechnology, data analysis, distribution of goods and resources, emergency and rescue operations, engineering systems design, environmental management, financial planning, health care management, inventory control, manpower and resource allocation, manufacturing of goods, military operations, production process control, risk management, sequencing and scheduling of tasks, telecommunications, and traffic control. Closely related disciplines include decision analysis, systems analysis, management science, control theory, game theory, optimization theory, robust optimization, constraint logic programming, artificial intelligence, fuzzy decision-making, multi-criteria analysis, and so on. All these disciplines share the objective of improving a quantitative decision making procedure.
Control Theory is the mathematical study of how to manipulate the parameters affecting the behavior of a system to produce the desired or optimal outcome. Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems. The external input of a system is called the reference. When one or more output variables of a system need to follow a certain reference over time, a controller manipulates the inputs to a system to obtain the desired effect on the output of the system. The usual objective of control theory is to calculate solutions for the proper corrective action from the controller that result in system stability, that is, the system will hold the set point and not oscillate around it.
Staff Members :
Tiande Guo, Suixiang Gao, Tong Zhao, Wenguo Yang, Congying Han
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