Management Science Anthology

Management science (MS for short) may be defined as the application of scientific method and analytical reasoning to the decision-making process employed by executives in the control of business, industrial or public systems for which they are responsible. These systems may consist of specific manufacturing activities, service or administrative operations, whole departments of plants, or even complete enterprises. This three-volume set attempts to approach this subject which was virtually unknown 50 years ago. It provides a history of the subject, an introduction and a definition. It focues on certain categories often distinguished in academic programmes, those of: allocation problems; inventory control; queuing theory; replacement theory and maintenance theory and maintenance policy; decision theory; statistical methods and probability theory; search methods; simulation methods; scheduling models; and competition problems, pointing out that these areas should not be regarded as mutually exclusive.
As an anthology, it avoids subject specialisms, and aims to provide the reader with a flavour of the wide range of specialist topics that have been developed in the literature on management science.