Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods
MIT's graduate course applies Operations Research techniques to transportation and logistics systems, covering urban, air, ocean, highway, and pick-up-and-delivery networks alongside the design of urban service systems such as fire, police, and emergency medical response. Lectures work through functions of random variables, geometrical probability, multi-server queueing theory, spatial location theory, network analysis, and graph theory, with simulation methods used to test these models against real deployment problems. Discussion sections address the practical difficulty of implementing these quantitative methods once they leave the classroom. Materials come from MIT OpenCourseWare and include lecture notes and problem sets drawn from Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Engineering Systems Division, reflecting the course's cross-departmental origins. No certificate is offered, but all readings and assignments are freely available for self-study.