History of OR

The modern field of operations research arose during World War II. 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. After the war it began to be applied to similar problems in industry.

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. 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. On the other hand, large convoys could deploy more warships against an attacker. Blackett's staff clearly showed that:[citation needed]

• Large convoys were more efficient
• The probability of detection by U-boat was statistically unrelated to the size of the convoy
• Slow convoys were at greater risk (though considered overall, large convoys were still to be preferred)

In another piece of work, Blackett's team analysed a report of a survey carried out by RAF Bomber Command.[citation needed] 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. 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.[citation needed]

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. 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 ("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, though OR is a common abbreviation everywhere. 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.

OR/IE Relationship

In recent years industrial engineering has broadened significantly as a discipline, and the support it now provides to production and manufacturing managers comes from staff specialists drawn not only from the field of industrial engineering but also from operations research, management science, computer science, and information systems. In the 1970s and 1980s industrial engineering became a more quantitative and computer-based profession, and operations research techniques were adopted as the core of most industrial engineering academic curricula in both the United States and Europe.

Since many of the problems of operations research originate in industrial production systems, it is often difficult to determine where the engineering discipline ends and the more basic scientific discipline begins (operations research is a branch of applied mathematics). Indeed, many academic industrial engineering departments now use the term industrial engineering and operations research or the reverse, further clouding the distinction.