Operations Research (OR) is an important branch of modern applied mathematics. After World War II, it became an independent area by itself, and affects the advancement of almost all areas of Engineering, Management Sciences and many different areas of applied sciences.

There are five or more faculty members involved in teaching and research in OR and related areas. At present there are more than five courses in OR; OR I, OR II, Advanced Topics in OR, Stochastic Modeling, Combinatorics and Algorithm Combinatorics. The department is actively developing new courses to meet the demand of the community. In the next two years, we plan to have at least three more advanced OR courses, namely, Advanced Linear Programming, Integer Programming and/or Combinatorial Optimization, and Networks. The courses are designed for senior undergraduate students and/or graduate students. Meanwhile the department will also develop at least two graduate only courses in OR.

The Mathematics Department has a strong research record in OR; Drs. Hickman, Liu and Wang serve on the editorial boards of international journals in OR and related areas. Also many articles in OR and related areas authored by the faculty members of this department are published every year. Dr Hickman has done work in models, computation methods and applications of optimization in many different areas, for instance, mathematical models for geographical analysis. Dr. Liu has published many papers in multiple objective linear programming, multilevel linear programming, and data mining. Recently, he has been working with Dr.V. Matache of this department and colleagues in Taiwan; jointly they are developing a new method for solving nonlinear programming problems with linear constraints by generating the entire null space of the linear constraints as a convex positive cone with a minimal set of generators.

This method is a good alternative to traditional methods of using Lagrange multipliers. Dr. Wang is an internationally well-known mathematician. He is one of the founders of non-additive measure theory and relevant non-linear integrals, a generalization of the well known fuzzy measure and fuzzy integrals, which can be applied to modern decision theory resulting in much better (more reliable) results. The OR program is growing rapidly. It has many international connections, along with successful international research projects, and recognition of the program is steadily increasing.

Dr. Yi-Hsin Liu

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