London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Modules

32
Management science methods

Prerequisites – 04a Statistics 1 and 05a Mathematics 1.

Management science considers the application of scientific and systematic methods to management problems, with the aim of developing and evaluating possible solutions. The subject can also be described by the alternative name of operational research. Management science as a discipline, and management scientists as consultants, helps management by providing a structure to decision making situations whose complexity and/or levels of uncertainty makes intuition an unsafe guide. The distinctive feature of the management science approach is the construction of an explicit, simplified model of relevant aspects of a situation under study. Such models are often based on mathematical or statistical formulations, but may at other times have a more qualitative or logical character.

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to management science methodology and to show how some of the more widely used techniques and procedures are applied. In many management situations, however, the nature of the problem to be addressed will itself be unclear. Therefore a critical stage of any study must be a careful attempt to identify and secure management agreement to a specific problem formulation. Management scientists have available a range of problem structuring methods which can assist in this first phase of a study and the course introduces and considers a selection of these.

In building models of an agreed decision problem certain kinds of technique and mathematical formulation have found repeated applications. Thus techniques have been developed to express common decision problems, and, where possible, to find optimal solutions. A main part of this course covers the most common of these standard techniques and considers their application to decision problems. Among the techniques studied are linear programming, simulation, and a variety of decision models including inventory control, queues and network analysis for project management. The syllabus considers the assumptions underlying these techniques, their limitations, the types of problems to which they could appropriately be applied, and their robustness to changes in data or assumptions.