Reviewer Comments on Operations Science Applied

"Operations Science Applied is an extremely timely book. Since the beginning of organized human behavior, systems for filling demands - production plants, supply chains, service systems, health care systems, project management systems, etc., - have been treated separately in texts, classes, and practice. We've long known that these systems have many commonalities and we therefore tend to invoke the same queuing and inventory models in analyzing them. But, unlike other engineering fields, such as mechanical engineering which relies on the sciences of statics and dynamics as a foundation for design and control of all mechanical systems, there has been no unified science for operations systems. Until now.

The authors construct a clearly defined basic model of an operation, which is applicable to any system that delivers any type of product to any type of customer. They use this model to describe the behavior and tradeoffs inherent in all operations systems, and invoke a wealth of applications to illustrate the utility of the model in real-world settings. It is particularly fitting that this unified treatment of operations systems has arrived as we are on the cusp of an AI revolution that will undoubtedly automate many of the decisions involved in delivering goods and services to customers. Without the basic model of operations, AI models are likely to struggle to translate insights across disparate settings, just as humans have done. With it, humans and AI will be able to make products better, faster, and cheaper than ever before. Consequently, this book, and the science it describes, is an essential part of the education of anyone (or anything) involved in the design, management, or control of operations systems."

Wally Hopp University of Michigan