The roots of operations research can be traced back to World War II when early attempts were made by British and American military forces to use a scientific approach in the management of their operations and activities. Subsequently, operations research received extensive interests from the industry before it evolves over the years to become a key domain that has been instrumental in advancement of various industrial, government, and military processes. Similarly, operations research plays an increasingly important role in modern medicine, life sciences and healthcare. In particular, many operational problems arising in the hospitals can be formulated into mathematical models and can be analyzed using sophisticated optimization, decision analysis, and computational techniques.  As healthcare profession-

als work continually to improve health-care operational efficiency in response to rising health-care costs and patient expectation, operations research offer effective scientific frameworks that can support their decision-making processes.