Overview of ordinal optimization

Concerns optimisation in the general sense of making things better, the principal driver behind all of prescriptive scientific and engineering endeavor. In particular, discrete-event dynamic systems are considered. The approach followed is based on the principles that much computation can be shared in the case of structurally similar systems; that easing the strict requirement of optimality can make an intractable problem tractable; and that for a given performance distribution it is possible to estimate various statistical measures of this distribution via sampling.<<ETX>>