PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH *
Jayant Rajgopal Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ABSTRACT This chapter will provide an overview of Operations Research (O.R.) from the perspective of an industrial engineer. The focus of the chapter is on the basic philosophy behind O.R. and the so-called “O.R. approach” to solving design and operational problems that industrial engineers commonly encounter. In its most basic form, O.R. may be viewed as a scientific approach to solving problems; it abstracts the essential elements of the problem into a model, which is then analyzed to yield an optimal solution for implementation. The mathematical details and the specific techniques used to build and analyze these models can be quite sophisticated and are addressed elsewhere in this handbook; the emphasis of this chapter is on the approach. A brief review of the historical origins of O.R. is followed by a detailed description of its methodology. The chapter concludes with some examples of successful real-world applications of O.R.

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Maynard's Industrial Engineering Handbook, 5th Edition, pp. 11.27-11.44.

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INTRODUCTION

Although it is a distinct discipline in its own right, Operations Research (O.R.) has also become an integral part of the Industrial Engineering (I.E.) profession. This is hardly a matter of surprise when one considers that they both share many of the same objectives, techniques and application areas. O.R. as a formal subject is about fifty years old and its origins may be traced to the latter half of World War II. Most of the O.R. techniques that are commonly used today were developed over (approximately) the first twenty years following its inception. During the next thirty or so years the pace of development of fundamentally new O.R. methodologies has slowed somewhat. However, there