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Operations Research (OR) in North America and Australia, and Operational Research in Europe, is an interdisciplinary branch of applied mathematics and formal science that uses methods like mathematical modeling, statistics, and algorithms to arrive at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex problems. Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and A formal science is a theoretical study that is concerned with theoretical Formal systems, for instance Logic, Mathematics, Systems theory and Note The term model has a different meaning in Model theory, a branch of Mathematical logic. Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection analysis interpretation or explanation and presentation of Data. In Mathematics, Computing, Linguistics and related subjects an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions often used for Calculation It is typically concerned with optimizing the maxima (profit, assembly line performance, crop yield, bandwidth, etc) or minima (loss, risk, etc) of some objective function. In Mathematics, maxima and minima, known collectively as extrema, are the largest value (maximum or smallest value (minimum that In Mathematics, maxima and minima, known collectively as extrema, are the largest value (maximum or smallest value (minimum that Operations research helps management achieve its goals using the scientific process.

Contents

Overview

The terms operations research and management science are often used synonymously. Management science (MS, is the discipline of using Mathematical modeling and other analytical methods to help make better business Management decisions When a distinction is drawn, management science generally implies a closer relationship to the problems of business management. Management (covering theory practice and scope of management and Manager' (covering the people who manage might help clarify and systematise Operations research also closely relates to Industrial engineering. Industrial engineering is also not good and shit Operations management, Systems engineering, production engineering manufacturing engineering or manufacturing systems Industrial engineering takes more of an engineering point of view, and industrial engineers typically consider Operations Research (OR) techniques to be a major part of their toolset.

Some of the primary tools used by operations researchers are statistics, optimization, probability theory, queuing theory, game theory, graph theory, decision analysis, and simulation. Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection analysis interpretation or explanation and presentation of Data. In Mathematics, the term optimization, or mathematical programming, refers to the study of problems in which one seeks to minimize or maximize a real function Probability theory is the branch of Mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines (or queues ' Game theory is a branch of Applied mathematics that is used in the Social sciences (most notably Economics) Biology, Engineering, In Mathematics and Computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects Decision Analysis (DA is the Discipline comprising the Philosophy, Theory, Methodology, and Professional practice necessary to address Simulation is the imitation of some real thing state of affairs or process Because of the computational nature of these fields, OR also has ties to computer science, and operations researchers regularly use custom-written or off-the-shelf software. Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their

Operations research is distinguished by its frequent use to examine an entire management information system, rather than concentrating only on specific elements (though this is often done as well). Management Information System ( MIS) is a subset of the overall Internal controls of a business covering the application of people documents technologies and procedures An operations researcher faced with a new problem is expected to determine which techniques are most appropriate given the nature of the system, the goals for improvement, and constraints on time and computing power. For this and other reasons, the human element of OR is vital. Like any other tools, OR techniques cannot solve problems by themselves.

Scope of operations research

Examples of applications in which operations research is currently used include:

Operations research is also used extensively in government where evidence-based policy is used. Evidence-based policy is Public policy informed by rigorously established objective Evidence.

History

Some say that Charles Babbage (1791-1871) is the "father of operations research" because his research into the cost of transportation and sorting of mail led to England's universal "Penny Post" in 1840. The Penny Post is any one of several Postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one Penny. [1] The modern field of operations research arose during World War II. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including Scientists in the United Kingdom including Patrick Blackett, Cecil Gordon, C. H. Waddington, Owen Wansbrough-Jones and Frank Yates, and in the United States with George Dantzig looked for ways to make better decisions in such areas as logistics and training schedules. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett Baron Blackett OM CH FRS ( 18 November 1897 &ndash 13 July 1974) was an Conrad Hal Waddington FRS FRSE (1905&ndash1975 was a developmental Biologist, paleontologist, Geneticist, Embryologist Sir Owen Haddon Wansbrough-Jones KBE, CB (born 1906 Long Stratton, Norfolk, England, died 1983 Long Stratton) was a Frank Yates ( May 12, 1902 - June 17, 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century Statistics. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the George Bernard Dantzig ( Nov 8 1914 &ndash May 13 2005) was an American Mathematician, and the Professor Emeritus of Transportation Logistics is the management of the flow of Goods, Information and other resources including Energy and people between the point of origin and the point After the war it began to be applied to similar problems in industry. For other uses of this term see Industry (disambiguation An industry (from Latin industrius, "diligent industrious"

Blackett's team made a number of crucial analyses which aided the war effort. Britain introduced the convoy system to reduce shipping losses, but while the principle of using warships to accompany merchant ships was generally accepted, it was unclear whether it was better for convoys to be small or large. A convoy is a group of Vehicles (of any type but usually motor vehicles or ships traveling together for mutual support A warship is a Ship that is built and primarily intended for Combat. A merchant vessel is a Ship that transports Cargo and Passengers during peace time Convoys travel at the speed of the slowest member, so small convoys can travel faster. It was also argued that small convoys would be harder for German U-boats to detect. U-boat is the anglicized version of the German word, itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot ( undersea boat) and refers On the other hand, large convoys could deploy more warships against an attacker. Blackett's staff showed that the losses suffered by convoys depended largely on the number of escort vessels present, rather than on the overall size of the convoy. Their conclusion, therefore, was that a few large convoys are more defensible than many small ones. [2]

In another piece of work, Blackett's team analysed a report of a survey carried out by RAF Bomber Command. RAF Bomber Command was the organisation that controlled the RAF 's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968 For the survey, Bomber Command inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defenses was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas. Anti-aircraft warfare, or air defense, is any method of engaging hostile military Aircraft in defence of ground objectives, ground or naval forces Their suggestion to remove some of the crew so that an aircraft loss would result in fewer personnel loss was rejected by RAF command. Blackett's team instead made the surprising and counter-intuitive recommendation that the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage, according to the survey. They reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that successfully came back from Germany. The untouched areas were probably vital areas, which, if hit, would result in the loss of the aircraft.

When the Germans organised their air defences into the Kammhuber Line, it was realised that if the RAF bombers were to fly in a bomber stream they could overwhelm the night fighters who flew in individual cells directed to their targets by ground controllers. The Kammhuber Line was the name given to the German night Air defense system established in July 1940 by Colonel Josef Kammhuber. The bomber stream was a tactic developed by the Royal Air Force (RAF It was then a matter of calculating the statistical loss from collisions against the statistical loss from night fighters to calculate how close the bombers should fly to minimise RAF losses. [1]

It is known as "operational research" in the United Kingdom (and "operational analysis" within the UK military and UK Ministry of Defence, where OR stands for "Operational Requirement") and as "operations research" in most other English-speaking countries, but "OR" is the common abbreviation everywhere. The Ministry of Defence ( MoD) is the United Kingdom government department responsible for implementation of government defence policy and is the headquarters With expanded techniques and growing awareness, OR is no longer limited to only operations, and the proliferation of computer data collection has relieved analysts of much of the more mundane research. But the OR analyst must still know how a system operates, and learn to perform even more sophisticated research than ever before. In every sense the name OR still applies, more than a half century later.

Societies and journals

Societies

The International Federation of Operational Research Societies[3] is an umbrella organization for operations research societies worldwide. For the fictional company set in the Resident Evil videogame series see Umbrella Corporation. Significant among these are:

In 2004 INFORMS began an initiative to better market the OR profession, including a website entitled The Science of Better[14] which provides an introduction to OR and examples of successful applications of OR to industrial problems.

Journals

INFORMS publishes twelve scholarly journals about operations research, including the top two journals in their class, according to 2005 Journal Citation Reports. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS is an international society for practitioners in the fields of Operations research and Management [15] They are:

Other journals

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ M. S. Sodhi, "What about the 'O' in O. R. ?" OR/MS Today, December, 2007, p. 12, http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-12-07/frqed.html
  2. ^ "Numbers are Essential": Victory in the North Atlantic Reconsidered, March-May 1943
  3. ^ IFORS
  4. ^ INFORMS
  5. ^ ORS
  6. ^ EURO
  7. ^ CORS
  8. ^ ASOR
  9. ^ MORS
  10. ^ ORSNZ
  11. ^ ORSP
  12. ^ ORSI
  13. ^ ORSSA
  14. ^ The Science of Better
  15. ^ INFORMS Journals
  16. ^ The OR Society.
  17. ^ TOP
  18. ^ JDMS

External links

Dictionary

operations research

-noun

  1. the application of scientific methods and techniques to problems of decision making
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