Dynamic Ideas offers the following books that are currently used in courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other universities.
Operations Strategy: Principles and Practice provides a unified framework for operations strategy. The book shows how to tailor the operational system to maximize value and competitive advantage. Conceptual thinking and financial optimization yield guidelines for implementation. This dual emphasis on principles and practice is reflected by analytical models that are illustrated with detailed examples and a dozen case studies of real business situations.
Developing Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems
by Michelle M.H. Şeref, Ravindra K. Ahuja, and Wayne L. Winston
Dynamic Ideas, Belmont, Massachusetts, 2007.
A decision support system (DSS) is an intelligent information system that uses data, models it, processes or analyzes it using problem-specific methodologies, and assists the user in the decision-making process through a graphical user interface (GUI). Developing Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems is a comprehensive book that describes how to build decision support systems using the Excel spreadsheet framework and the VBA programming language. This book illustrates complete decision support development applications through several case studies arising in operations research, industrial engineering, management, and business administration.
Decision support systems combine models, data, and information technology for effective decision-making and are becoming increasingly popular in business and industry. Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems is a comprehensive book that describes how to build data-driven, Web-enabled decision support systems using a Microsoft Access database, VB .NET, and an ASP .NET framework and illustrates it using several case studies arising in Management, Engineering, and Operations Research.
Increasingly, citizens are demanding more urban services, by type, quantity, and quality. Yet the ability of most cities in the United States and elsewhere to pay for additional services has been severely strained during the 1970s. The resulting pressure, between the demands for more and better services, on the one hand, and decreased costs, on the other, has created a strong need for improved management decision making in urban services. It is a primary purpose of this book to provide methods for assisting these decisions.
The purpose of this book is to provide a unified, insightful, and modern treatment of the theory of integer optimization with an eye towards the future. We have selected those topics that we feel have influenced the current state of the
art and most importantly we feel will affect the future of the field.
The book is used in the PhD level class ``Integer and Combinatorial Optimization'' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For solutions to exercises and other instructor resources, please contact the authors directly
This book represents a departure from existing textbooks. Rather than covering methodology, the book introduces decision support systems through real world applications, and uses spreadsheets to model and solve problems. It uses management science techniques (statistics, simulation, probabilistic modeling and optimization), but only as tools to facilitate problem solving.
DownloadSpreadsheet data and partially-and/or fully-constructed models for many of the cases in the book.
For Powerpoint presentation slides for lecture material, solutions to exercises and other instructor resources, please contact the authors directly (
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Operations Strategy: Principles and Practice provides a unified framework for operations strategy. The book shows how to tailor the operational system to maximize value and competitive advantage. Conceptual thinking and financial optimization yield guidelines for implementation. This dual emphasis on principles and practice is reflected by analytical models that are illustrated with detailed examples and a dozen case studies of real business situations. 
