Название: Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research, 2nd Edition
Автор: Natalie M. Scala, James P. Howard, II
Издательство: CRC Press
Год: 2025
Страниц: 575
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 34.3 MB

Tracing its roots back to World War II, operations research (OR) has become a vital tool in military and defense strategy. The second edition of the Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research highlights this evolution, showcasing how OR integrates with cutting-edge areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, and Big Data analytics.

This volume is more than a historical account; it is a practical guide. The volume features expert voices and offers insights into OR applications in modern security challenges. Readers will discover a blend of theory and real-world case studies, making it an essential resource for both newcomers and seasoned defense analysis professionals.

Operations research (OR) is a core discipline in military and defense management. Coming to the forefront initially during World War II, OR provided critical contributions to logistics, supply chains, and strategic simulation, while enabling superior decision making for Allied forces. Since these early days, OR has grown to include analytics and many applications, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and machine learning, and is the cornerstone of management science in manufacturing, marketing, telecommunications, and many other fields. The Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research presents the voices leading OR and analytics to new heights in security through research, practical applications, case studies, and lessons learned in the field.

No longer constrained to printed tables and traditional optimization problems, OR and analytics support a dynamic problem space that has applications for national security, policing, cyberspace, foreign policy, terrorism, and homeland security. Because of this, there is a critical need for students, practitioners, military, and security analysts to understand the problem space, best practices, and lessons learned from real‑life problems. Contextual milieu is key to understanding and developing cutting‑edge analyses that transform national security and advance both traditional and emerging military operations research and analytics applications.

To achieve these goals, we arrange the second edition of the book into three sections: (1) approaches, (2) applications, and (3) soft skills and perspectives. We present approaches that range from general to specific and provide detailed guidance on employing traditional OR and analytics techniques to the military and defense problem space. This includes using mainstream software tools, such as Microsoft Excel, to develop analyses; applying analytics and data science methods; leveraging influence diagrams, utility theory, and ­decision analysis; assessing workforce planning needs; and performing assessments.

We also present forward thinking approaches, such as threatcasting, to examine needs and potential adversarial actions in the long‑term future. Additional approaches include modeling of stochastic systems, graph theoretic analyses of social networks, process optimization, simulation modeling and validation, test planning for defense acquisition, and time series forecasting.

Next, we present case studies that illustrate OR and analytics in action as well as examples that include applying decision analysis principles to cybersecurity metrics and best practices, information theory to critical information in the NATO alliance, lot streaming and decomposition to army readiness, and machine learning with natural language processing to weather‑related impacts on operations and safety. We intend for these examples to deepen students’ understandings of the approaches presented in this book and to kick‑start practitioners in implementing cutting‑edge military and defense OR and analytics in their organizations.

Dive into this handbook to explore the rich, dynamic field of military and defense operations research, a discipline at the heart of global security and strategic decision-making.

New to the second edition:
- Reorganized into a three-part structure
- Extensive revisions throughout
- Numerous new exercises, examples, and case studies
- Several new chapters








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