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Opening / summary
This sentence, which opens the definition, is extremely broad, pedantic, and could be applied to numerous disciplines. The end result is it's basically meaningless. Someone with greater depth of knowledge should revise
- "Operations research, or operational research in British usage, is a discipline that deals with the application of advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions.[1] " — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Witty al (
talk •
contribs)
17:35, 10 February 2017 (UTC)reply
I will look for and, as I find it. add some material that has not been previously referred to. What I see parallels what is referred to here as "British usage" but it isn't simply British that was left out. I see an additional source and two tie-in wiki topics could be included. 1) An additional source for Operations research is with regard to the US Navy and some higher education and it seems to be missing here. Today, the Naval Postgraduate School npu.edu in fact has an entire section on operations research and there is a history to it along with the aforementioned British usage. 2) Major components of OR are concerned with "logistics" (another wikipedia topic) and process optimization. A lot of material on process optimization has recently emerged and studied under the rubric of "data engineering" also a wikipedia topic.
Pythologist (
talk)
18:38, 23 October 2022 (UTC)reply
Further Reading
I have updated this section with some of the classic books in the field, so that somebody interested in reading the pioneering works in the discipline doesn't have to go searching around for them. Obviously, there are about a million articles that could have been added to this list, but it would have run on forever if they were included.
I listed the most revered textbooks in the field. Harvey Wagner's textbook won the Lanchester prize, and Hillier and Lieberman's book is currently in its 10th edition. I also took out (and I know this is going to be controversial), all of the other textbooks, simply because all of these textbooks cover virtually the same topics, and while I have nothing against any of them, listing them all is duplicative.
Finally, I included books for those interested in the history of the discipline, without wanting to get too far into the mathematics of the discipline.
Modern operational research originated at the
Bawdsey Research Station in the UK in 1937 and was the result of an initiative of the station's superintendent,
A. P. Rowe.
In his later books
Edgerton argues that the methods and techniques of OR predate WW2 by some decades and that it only became a coherent academic discipline in WW2: prior to that point industrialists and time-and-motion men were doing it quite happily for many years without the benefit of academic oversight. It's like saying America didn't exist until Europeans discovered it. Similarly OR existed for many years before academics discovered it. Regards,
Anameofmyveryown (
talk)
01:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)reply
The 'operations' part of the term refers to military operations not to industrial or similar 'time and motion' studies. It means using scientists in close co-operation with operational military or air force units such as fighter and bomber squadrons, naval units, etc., in order to solve specific problems or to improve effectiveness of these units. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
86.8.126.91 (
talk)
19:24, 21 June 2023 (UTC)reply
Operations Research is a subfield of X
Listing operations as a subfield of applied mathematics is inaccurate. According to the latest Survey of Earned Doctorates, operations research can be considered a field of mathematics, engineering, and management. According to the latest Joint Academic Coding System, operational research is a subdiscipline of mathematical sciences, separate from mathematics and statistics.
The citation supporting the claim that operations research is a subdiscipline of applied mathematics points to the AMS Mathematics Subject Classification, which also includes astronomy, geophysics, biology, and other completely separate disciplines. The AMS MSC is intended to provide a taxonomy of AMS journal submissions rather than a statement that all of these topics belong under the umbrella of mathematics.