THE ORIGINS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH

■ THE ORIGINS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, the world has seen a remarkable growth in the size and complexity of organizations. The artisans’ small shops of an earlier era have evolved into the billion-dollar corporations of today. An integral part of this revolutionary change has been a tremendous increase in the division of labor and segmentation of man- agement responsibilities in these organizations. The results have been spectacular. How- ever, along with its blessings, this increasing specialization has created new problems, problems that are still occurring in many organizations. One problem is a tendency for the many components of an organization to grow into relatively autonomous empires with their own goals and value systems, thereby losing sight of how their activities and objec- tives mesh with those of the overall organization. What is best for one component fre- quently is detrimental to another, so the components may end up working at cross purposes. A related problem is that as the complexity and specialization in an organization increase, it becomes more and more difficult to allocate the available resources to the vari- ous activities in a way that is most effective for the organization as a whole. These kinds of problems and the need to find a better way to solve them provided the environment for the emergence of operations research (commonly referred to as OR).

The roots of OR can be traced back many decades,1 when early attempts were made to use a scientific approach in the management of organizations. However, the beginning of the activity called operations research has generally been attributed to the military services early in World War II. Because of the war effort, there was an urgent need to allocate scarce resources to the various military operations and to the activities within each operation in an effective manner. Therefore, the British and then the U.S. military management called upon a large number of scientists to apply a scientific approach to dealing with this and other strategic and tactical problems. In effect, they were asked to do research on (military) operations. These teams of scientists were the first OR teams. By developing effective methods of using the new tool of radar, these teams were instrumental in winning the Air Bat- tle of Britain. Through their research on how to better manage convoy and antisubmarine operations, they also played a major role in winning the Battle of the North Atlantic. Similar efforts assisted the Island Campaign in the Pacific.

1Selected Reference 7 provides an entertaining history of operations research that traces its roots as far back as 1564 by describing a considerable number of scientific contributions from 1564 to 2004 that influenced the sub- sequent development of OR. Also see Selected References 1 and 6 for further details about this history.

When the war ended, the success of OR in the war effort spurred interest in applying OR outside the military as well. As the industrial boom following the war was running its course, the problems caused by the increasing complexity and specialization in organiza- tions were again coming to the forefront. It was becoming apparent to a growing number of people, including business consultants who had served on or with the OR teams during the war, that these were basically the same problems that had been faced by the military but in a different context. By the early 1950s, these individuals had introduced the use of OR to a variety of organizations in business, industry, and government. The rapid spread of OR soon followed. (Selected Reference 6 recounts the development of the field of operations research by describing the lives and contributions of 43 OR pioneers.)

At least two other factors that played a key role in the rapid growth of OR during this period can be identified. One was the substantial progress that was made early in improving the techniques of OR. After the war, many of the scientists who had participated on OR teams or who had heard about this work were motivated to pursue research relevant to the field; important advancements in the state of the art resulted. A prime example is the simplex method for solving linear programming problems, developed by George Dantzig in 1947. Many of the standard tools of OR, such as linear programming, dynamic programming, queueing theory, and inventory theory, were relatively well developed before the end of the 1950s.

A second factor that gave great impetus to the growth of the field was the onslaught of the computer revolution. A large amount of computation is usually required to deal most effectively with the complex problems typically considered by OR. Doing this by hand would often be out of the question. Therefore, the development of electronic digital com- puters, with their ability to perform arithmetic calculations millions of times faster than a human being can, was a tremendous boon to OR. A further boost came in the 1980s with the development of increasingly powerful personal computers accompanied by good soft- ware packages for doing OR. This brought the use of OR within the easy reach of much larger numbers of people, and this progress further accelerated in the 1990s and into the 21st century. For example, the widely used spreadsheet package, Microsoft Excel, pro- vides a Solver that will solve a variety of OR problems.Today, literally millions of individ- uals have ready access to OR software. Consequently, a whole range of computers from mainframes to laptops now are being routinely used to solve OR problems, including some of enormous size.