Operations research
Operations research is often concerned with determining the extreme values of some real-world objective: the maximum (of profit, performance, or yield) or minimum (of loss, risk, or cost).
Originating in military efforts before World War II, its techniques have grown to concern problems in a variety of industries.
[3] Operations research (OR) encompasses the development and the use of a wide range of problem-solving techniques and methods applied in the pursuit of improved decision-making and efficiency, such as simulation, mathematical optimization, queueing theory and other stochastic-process models, Markov decision processes, econometric methods, data envelopment analysis, ordinal priority approach, neural networks, expert systems, decision analysis, and the analytic hierarchy process.
Since that time, operational research has expanded into a field widely used in industries ranging from petrochemicals to airlines, finance, logistics, and government, moving to a focus on the development of mathematical models that can be used to analyse and optimize sometimes complex systems, and has become an area of active academic and industrial research.
[7] Charles Babbage's research into the cost of transportation and sorting of mail led to England's universal "Penny Post" in 1840, and to studies into the dynamical behaviour of railway vehicles in defence of the GWR's broad gauge.
Percy Bridgman brought operational research to bear on problems in physics in the 1920s and would later attempt to extend these to the social sciences.
[10] Rowe conceived the idea as a means to analyse and improve the working of the UK's early-warning radar system, code-named "Chain Home" (CH).
[11] Scientists in the United Kingdom (including Patrick Blackett (later Lord Blackett OM PRS), Cecil Gordon, Solly Zuckerman, (later Baron Zuckerman OM, KCB, FRS), C. H. Waddington, Owen Wansbrough-Jones, Frank Yates, Jacob Bronowski and Freeman Dyson), and in the United States (George Dantzig) looked for ways to make better decisions in such areas as logistics and training schedules.
[17] Blackett's team at Coastal Command's Operational Research Section (CC-ORS) included two future Nobel Prize winners and many other people who went on to be pre-eminent in their fields.
While performing an analysis of the methods used by RAF Coastal Command to hunt and destroy submarines, one of the analysts asked what colour the aircraft were.
At the suggestion of CC-ORS a test was run to see if that was the best colour to camouflage the aircraft for daytime operations in the grey North Atlantic skies.
The reason was that if a U-boat saw an aircraft only shortly before it arrived over the target then at 100 feet the charges would do no damage (because the U-boat wouldn't have had time to descend as far as 100 feet), and if it saw the aircraft a long way from the target it had time to alter course under water so the chances of it being within the 20-foot kill zone of the charges was small.
It was more efficient to attack those submarines close to the surface when the targets' locations were better known than to attempt their destruction at greater depths when their positions could only be guessed.
Blackett observed "there can be few cases where such a great operational gain had been obtained by such a small and simple change of tactics".
Blackett's team made the logical recommendation that the armor be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage in the bombers who returned.
[23] This story has been disputed,[24] with a similar damage assessment study completed in the US by the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University,[25] the result of work done by Abraham Wald.
[28] Operational research doubled the on-target bomb rate of B-29s bombing Japan from the Marianas Islands by increasing the training ratio from 4 to 10 percent of flying hours; revealed that wolf-packs of three United States submarines were the most effective number to enable all members of the pack to engage targets discovered on their individual patrol stations; revealed that glossy enamel paint was more effective camouflage for night fighters than conventional dull camouflage paint finish, and a smooth paint finish increased airspeed by reducing skin friction.
Operations research also grew in many areas other than the military once scientists learned to apply its principles to the civilian sector.
[citation needed] In the 1950s and 1960s, chairs of operations research were established in the U.S. and United Kingdom (from 1964 in Lancaster) in the management faculties of universities.
[citation needed] With the development of computers over the next three decades, Operations Research can now solve problems with hundreds of thousands of variables and constraints.
It uses various scientific research-based principles, strategies, and analytical methods including mathematical modeling, statistics and numerical algorithms to improve an organization's ability to enact rational and meaningful management decisions by arriving at optimal or near-optimal solutions to sometimes complex decision problems.
The management scientist's mandate is to use rational, systematic, science-based techniques to inform and improve decisions of all kinds.
[36] Some of the fields that have considerable overlap with Operations Research and Management Science include:[37] Applications are abundant such as in airlines, manufacturing companies, service organizations, military branches, and government.
[50] The constituent members of IFORS form regional groups, such as that in Europe, the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO).
