Till the moodle page for the course is active, some instructions.
* All B.Tech and DD students must email me a proposal for a course project, whose weightage is 20-30% in the overall evaluation. This should be sent by mail to narayan.rangaraj@iitb.ac.in before lunch time on Friday 11 Jan. Based on this, I will approve registration. The proposal should be individual, in your own words, and at least 100 words long. It should propose content that will involve at least 15 hours of hard work. An initial reference in the literature may be useful to give me an idea of what you are thinking about, but it is not essential.
* The course will cover material on how to look at infrastructure and service systems, their design, planning and operation. In infrastructure, transport systems will be taken as the example sector and capacity planning problems, timetabling problems, allocation of crew and other resources will be studied. In service systems, examples from various sectors such as health care, entertainment, education etc will be surveyed.
* The main techniques used will be optimization models, including Linear and integer programming and network models, game theory, dynamic programming and some queueing theory. Students should have or be able to pick up some familiarity with these topics as requried because that is not the focus of the course. The emphasis will be on problem structuring, interpretation of results and understanding the sector being studied.
* Attendance will be taken. If the performance is not good, this may then count against you in the final grade (i.e. there may be some weightage towards class participation). If performance in exams is adequate and a project of good quality is submitted, attendance is not compulsory.