Master's Prep Courses

Duration

• 4-week course
• Workload: 7 ECTS

Duration

• 2-week course
• Workload: 5.5 ECTS

Duration

• 8-week course
• Workload: 5 ECTS

Contents

• Accounting
• Investments and financing
• Thinking strategically and production
• Marketing and innovation
• Management and organization
• Controlling
• Managerial skills

Duration

• 6-week course
• Workload: 5 ECTS

Contents

An essential aspect of the managerial education is to be able to base decisions on mathematical models and methods. In fact, many planning and decision situations (in production, logistics, energy systems, health care, education, politics, etc.) can be formally captured. The resulting decision models are given to optimization algorithms which can produce a provably best decision support. This yields indispensible tools for the decision maker in situations where decisions are vastly interdependent and the number of alternatives is prohibitively large.

In this Master's Prep Course Quantitative Methods, students learn about decision/optimization models and how to solve them algorithmically. In particular, the two areas of (1) graphs/networks and graph algorithms, and (2) linear optimization are covered. The former deals with problems like shortest paths in networks, and maximum flows and minimum cost flows. The second part introduces to linear optimization problems in general, their properties, how to solve them with the simplex method, and useful theory around them (like duality in linear optimization).

All theory is accompanied by many modeling examples, as optimization modeling is a main skill to be learned in this course. Next to practical applications, the general philosophy of the course is to provide generally applicable methods and tools instead of dealing only with specific cases. The modeling tasks will be completed using state-of-the-art software that is accessed via a programming language like Python.