20/30 Hindsight: What Is Operations Research?
| Autor: | Robert G. Chamberlain |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Interfaces. 34:123-123 |
| ISSN: | 1526-551X 0092-2102 |
| Popis: | Amateurs are people who love what they are doing. Pros are people who get paid for doing it. Sessions like “OR in sports” at our meetings are often “pro-am” events. It may be easier to turn pro if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, but all you have to do is find a niche in a good OR group or university. If your niche is in a university, you can even engage in OR as a fine art. (Elsewhere, failure to engage in worthwhile applications will return you to the ranks of the amateurs.) If you want to be among the top money earners, you have to produce solutions that save or generate large amounts of money. Does every puzzle provide an opportunity to perform operations research? Of course not. But if the puzzle involves interactions of things and people in the real world and does not clearly fall into some other category of science or engineering, it is likely to be suitable. As Gene Woolsey has told us time and again, our projects must have large, demonstrable impact if we hope to be paid to have our fun, but those results are not defining characteristics of the kinds of puzzles that lead to OR. I recall, for example, an unpublished amateur OR analysis I did over 25 years ago to find a general rule we could use to select dates for our local Boy Scout Camporee. All that was required was to ensure there would be no conflict with any of the scouts’ Little League commitments or with other community events and that it was not too likely to be dampened by rain. Most OR puzzles have a mathematical component, but mathematics is not an essential part of what we do. Rather, it is the application of rational, analytical, systematic thought, and a scientific or engineering point of view to problems that are not currently addressed by any other discipline that distinguishes operations research from other puzzle-solving activities. Most OR puzzles concern decisions and the use of resources, but the decision makers may be engineers rather than managers. In the 1960s and 1970s, we sometimes allowed the resources whose use was to be improved (optimized? in our dreams!) to be decision variables rather than constraints and called what we were doing systems analysis. In the 1960s, I was looking at spacecraft launch probabilities and at the feasibility of dumping nuclear waste into the sun. In the late 1970s, I actually got to make a model of a nascent industry (Chamberlain 1979). What fun! We were asking ourselves what we mean by operations research when I joined ORSA and TIMS in 1964. We were also asking “How can we get the decision makers to pay attention to us?” and “How can we get the practitioners and academics to talk to each other?” I heard neither of these questions, which persisted for decades, in Atlanta. Indeed, I saw that important decision makers are relying heavily on us, and I saw a considerable amount of collaboration between those who exclusively do and those who exclusively publish. Maybe our profession is making progress! |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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