Summary

This book explains - in non-technical and informative language - the range of decision models and techniques available to help the business manager maximize his resources. With the aid of case studies, drawn largely from the area of agribusiness, the book demonstrates how these techniques can be usefully applied at relatively low cost. It represents the successful results of an international collaboration by 25 researchers from 20 different countries. Many of the papers are published here for the first-time; others appear for the first time in English, while the rest have been collected from widely dispersed sources not really accessible to those outside the operations research field. Although the studies relate to agribusiness, they are also transferable to a much wider segment of the industry and services sectors and will be read with profit by managers of firms engaged in a wide range of business activities.