James B. Orlin's home page
The MIT Operations Research Center. This is the web site for the MIT Operations Research Center. The focal point of this center is the graduate programs.
General Information on Operations Research
The page formerly known as Mike Trick's . This is a remarkable resource. Check it out.
INFORMS. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. It is the most visited site on the web for Operations Research.
The Student Union. The INFORMS Student Union aims to be the preeminent Web site for students and recent graduates in OR/MS and related fields. It seeks to fill their most important needs insofar as that can be done on-line.
WORMS. (World of Operations Research and Management Science). An excellent general site for Operations Research maintained at the University of Melbourne.
Yahoo. This is Yahoo's site for Operations Research.
Operations Research Links. This is a set of links maintained by OpsResearch.com.
Excel and Excel Solver®
Excel Tutorial. This is a tutorial developed by Professor Brad James of the University of South Dakota. If you don't know Excel already, it's an easy way to pick it up quickly. Not surprisingly, it is not intended for MIT students.
Add-ins for Excel. Developed by Paul Jensen.
Frontline Systems. This is the company that developed Excel Solver®. They also have a special site with an Excel Solver® tutorial
Excel Solver® Tutorial. This has pointers to tutorials for Excel, Excel Solver, and Visual Basic
Optimization
RIOT. Remote Interactive Optimization Testbed. 2-dimensional linear programs, multidimensional linear programs, plus lots more. Developed by researchers at Berkeley.
Mathematical Programming Glossary This glossary, developed by Harvey Greenberg, provides definitions for linear programs and lots of extensions of linear programs. It also is a wealth of information about mathematical programming..
e-optimization
This is a site for the optimization community, sponsored by ILOG, who has some of the best commercial software in optimization.
Decision Tree for Optimization Software
This categorizes non-commercial codes, gives a listing of tutorials and has lots of other interesting information on optimization.
Tom Cavalier's site
This is Tom Cavalier's list of links for optimization and more.
NEOS Guide to Optimization (Network Enabled Optimization System). Lots of information on Linear Programming, Non-linear programming, and Network Optimization. This is a service of the Optimization Technology Center at the Argonne National Laboratory. Here is a list of all of Argonne's case studies.
NEOS Diet Problem. How to choose the best diet at minimum cost. (Unfortunately, how good it tastes is omitted.)
NEOS Portfolio Problem. How to choose the portfolio with the least risk while guranteeing a good expected return. (One can also trade off risk vs. return in other ways.)
Frequently Asked Questions on Linear and Nonlinear Programming. These are the FAQs initiated by John Gregory, now maintained by Bob Fourer as part of the NEOS Guide. They are excellent guides, and provides resources beyond linear and non-linear programming. For example, the non-linear guide provides lots of information about heuristic search.
Optimization Software. This is the NEOS Guide to Optimization, drawn from a book by More and Wright.
Web sites for Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization. This is a list of web sites compiled by Harvey Greenberg
Software for Optimization : A Buyer's Guide. Part 1. By Rob Fourer.
Optimization : A Buyer's Guide. Part 2. By Rob Fourer.
Tutorial on Integer Programming. Lecture material by Mike Trick
The Traveling Salesman Problem. These are Java routines for solving the TSP.
Dynamic Programming
A tutorial on dynamic programming. Lecture material from Mike Trick
Dynamic Programming tutorial for DNA sequence alignment. This is a tutorial on the sequence alignment algorithm developed by Needleman and Wunsch.
Heuristics
GA PlayGround Genetic Algorithms java applet and application
GAlib. GAlib contains a set of C++ genetic algorithm objects. The library includes tools for using genetic algorithms to do optimization in any C++ program using any representation and genetic operators.
Ant Colony Optimization. We won't actually cover this in class, and it is an overhyped idea. Nevertheless, the idea of using virtual ants to solve optimization problems is intriguing.
NP-completeness and more
This is a compendium of NP-complete and NP-hard problems. It also lists whether these problems can be solved approximately.
Graph Algorithms and Network Flows
GIDEN: A Graphical Implementation Development Environment for Networks. This illustrates lots of network algorithms including the shortest path algorithm, the max flow algorithm, and the network simplex algorithm. (Actually, the demo version does not do the network simplex algorithm.)
Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm. This is an applet for solving the shortest path problem.
The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository. This includes a suite of algorithms for data structures and graph problems.