Teaching

 

Both research and teaching at the Chair of Management Science is interdisciplinary in character. Our courses are targeted at students of economics and business administration, mathematics, and computer science.

In our courses, we focus on optimization problems from business and industry, especially from production and from transport and communications logistics. Research and teaching go hand in hand, so by having a look at our key research areas you can get an impression of the topics we address in our courses. We teach our students suitable methods and approaches to solve the problems under consideration.

Of course it is not possible for us to cover the whole range of real world optimization problems. But we provide our students with a “toolbox” of algorithms and analytic methods that can be adapted and combined to help find solutions to a broad range of problems, even complex ones.

Most students of economics and business administration will not have to develop novel methods to solve concrete optimization problems. They may ask themselves, why do they have to learn about such methods and approaches during their studies?

The reason is simple: even though it is mostly programmers who develop efficient solution methods, it is immensely helpful, possibly even essential, that those in managerial positions have a solid analytical grasp of the existing optimization problems and their complexity. Several examples from management, particularly from the logistics sector, demonstrate that the use of well-known combinatorial algorithms lead to significant reductions in costs. For this reason, solid knowledge in this field is likely to result in competitive advantages in the marketplace.