• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Operation Research

steve_bank

Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Joined
Nov 9, 2017
Messages
13,817
Location
seattle
Basic Beliefs
secular-skeptic
Operations Research among other things is concerned with optimal solutions like the shortest transit path in logistics.

There is a vast area of applied math that does not get the attention of science but that is important in general society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

Operational research (OR) encompasses a wide range of problem-solving techniques and methods applied in the pursuit of improved decision-making and efficiency, such as simulation, mathematical optimization, queueing theory and other stochastic-process models, Markov decision processes, econometric methods, data envelopment analysis, neural networks, expert systems, decision analysis, and the analytic hierarchy process.[5] Nearly all of these techniques involve the construction of mathematical models that attempt to describe the system. Because of the computational and statistical nature of most of these fields, OR also has strong ties to computer science and analytics. Operational researchers faced with a new problem must determine which of these techniques are most appropriate given the nature of the system, the goals for improvement, and constraints on time and computing power.

The major subdisciplines in modern operational research, as identified by the journal Operations Research,[6] are:

Computing and information technologies
Financial engineering
Manufacturing, service sciences, and supply chain management
Policy modeling and public sector work
Revenue management
Simulation
Stochastic models
Transportation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routing

Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network, or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and computer networks, such as the Internet.

In packet switching networks, routing is the higher-level decision making that directs network packets from their source toward their destination through intermediate network nodes by specific packet forwarding mechanisms. Packet forwarding is the transit of logically addressed network packets from one network interface to another. Intermediate nodes are typically network hardware devices such as routers, bridges, gateways, firewalls, or switches. General-purpose computers also forward packets and perform routing, although they have no specially optimized hardware for the task.

The routing process usually directs forwarding on the basis of routing tables, which maintain a record of the routes to various network destinations. Routing tables may be specified by an administrator, learned by observing network traffic or built with the assistance of routing protocols.

Routing, in a narrower sense of the term, often refers to IP routing and is contrasted with bridging. Routing assumes that network addresses are structured and that similar addresses imply proximity within the network. Structured addresses allow a single routing table entry to represent the route to a group of devices. In large networks, structured addressing (routing, in the narrow sense) outperforms unstructured addressing (bridging). Routing has become the dominant form of addressing on the Internet. Bridging is still widely used within local area networks.
 
Back
Top Bottom