Lecture_1_Introduction and overview of OR

1.1 Origin of Operations Research
The term Operations Research (OR) was first coined by MC Closky and Trefthen in 1940 in a
small town, Bowdsey of UK. The main origin of OR was during the second world war – The
military commands of UK and USA engaged several inter-disciplinary teams of scientists to
undertake scientific research into strategic and tactical military operations.
Their mission was to formulate specific proposals and to arrive at the decision on optimal
utilization of scarce military resources and also to implement the decisions effectively. In simple
words, it was to uncover the methods that can yield greatest results with little efforts. Thus it had
gained popularity and was called “An art of winning the war without actually fighting it”
The name Operations Research (OR) was invented because the team was dealing with research
on military operations. The encouraging results obtained by British OR teams motivated US
military management to start with similar activities. The work of OR team was given various
names in US: Operational Analysis, Operations Evaluation, Operations Research, System
Analysis, System Research, Systems Evaluation and so on.
The first method in this direction was simplex method of linear programming developed in 1947
by G.B Dantzig, USA. Since then, new techniques and applications have been developed to yield
high profit from least costs.
Now OR activities has become universally applicable to any area such as transportation, hospital
management, agriculture, libraries, city planning, financial institutions, construction management
and so forth. In India many of the industries like Delhi cloth mills, Indian Airlines, Indian
Railway, etc are making use of OR activity.