1) Decision theory in economics, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics is

concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision, its rationality, and the resulting optimal decision. It is closely related to the field of game theory as to interactions of agents with at least partially conflicting interests whose decisions affect each other.

2) Safety stock (also called buffer stock) is a term used by logisticians to describe a level of
extra stock that is maintained to mitigate risk of stockouts (shortfall in raw material or packaging) due to uncertainties in supply and demand. Adequate safety stock levels permit [1] business operations to proceed according to their plans. Safety stock is held when there is uncertainty in the demand level or lead time for the product; it serves as an insurance against stockouts. With a new product, safety stock can be utilized as a strategic tool until the company can judge how accurate their forecast is after the first few years, especially when used with a material requirements planning worksheet. The less accurate the forecast, the more safety stock is required. With a material requirements planning (MRP) worksheet a company can judge how much they will need to produce to meet their forecasted sales demand without relying on safety stock. However, a common strategy is to try and reduce the level of safety stock to help keep inventory costs low once the product demand becomes more predictable. This can be extremely important for companies with a smaller financial cushion or those trying to run on lean manufacturing, which is aimed towards eliminating waste throughout the production process. The amount of safety stock an organization chooses to keep on hand can dramatically affect their business. Too much safety stock can result in high holding costs of inventory. In addition, products which are stored for too long a time can spoil, expire, or break during the warehousing process. Too little safety stock can result in lost sales and, thus, a higher rate of customer turnover. As a result, finding the right balance between too much and too little safety stock is essential.

3) In mathematics, a duality, generally speaking, translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion, often (but not always) by means of an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. Such involutions sometimes have fixed points, so that the dual of A is A itself. For example, Desargues' theorem in projective geometry is self-dual in this sense. In mathematical contexts, duality has numerous meanings[clarification needed] although it is a very pervasive and important concept in (modern) mathematicsand an important general theme that has manifestations in almost every area of mathematics. Many mathematical dualities between objects of two types correspond to pairings, bilinear functions from an object of one type and another object of the second type to some family of scalars. For instance, linear algebra duality corresponds in this way to bilinear maps from pairs of vector spaces to scalars, the duality between distributions and the associated test functions corresponds to the pairing in which one integrates a distribution against a test function, and Poincar duality corresponds similarly to intersection number, viewed as a pairing between submanifolds of a given manifold.

4) A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm. Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to help identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal. 5)

6) PERT is a method to analyze the involved tasks in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project. PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy's Polaris nuclear submarine project. It was able to incorporate uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than startand completion-oriented, and is used more in projects where time is the major factor rather than cost. It is applied to very large-scale, one-time, complex, non-routine infrastructure and Research and Development projects. An example of this was for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble which applied PERT from 1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games.[3] This project model was the first of its kind, a revival for scientific management, founded by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism) and later refined by Henry Ford (Fordism). DuPont's critical path methodwas invented at roughly the same time as PERT. The essential technique for using CPM is to construct a model of the project that includes the following: 1. A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within a work breakdown structure), 2. The time (duration) that each activity will take to completion, and 3. The dependencies between the activities. Using these values, CPM calculates the longest path of planned activities to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer. This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration. This determines the shortest time possible to complete the project. Any delay of an activity on the critical path directly impacts the planned project completion date (i.e. there is no float on the critical path). A project can have several, parallel, near critical paths. An additional parallel path through the network with the total durations shorter than the critical path is called a sub-critical or non-critical path.

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