Book excerpt: This book is about prescriptive analytics. It provides business practitioners and students with a selected set of management science and optimization techniques and discusses the fundamental concepts, methods, and models needed to understand and implement these techniques in the era of Big Data. A large number of management science models exist in the body of literature today. These models include optimization techniques or heuristics, static or dynamic programming, and deterministic or stochastic modeling. The topics selected in this book, mathematical programming and simulation modeling, are believed to be among the most popular management science tools, as they can be used to solve a majority of business optimization problems. Over the years, these techniques have become the weapon of choice for decision makers and practitioners when dealing with complex business systems.