Andrade

1 Introduction

1.1

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 laborand segmentation of management responsibilities in these organizations. The results have been spectacular. However, 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 valuesystems, thereby losing sight of how their activities and objectives mesh with those of the overall organization. What is best for one component frequently 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 resourcesto the various 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, when early attempts were made to use a scientific approach in the management oforganizations. 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 calledupon 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 Battle of Britain. Through theirresearch 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. 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 run1

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1 INTRODUCTION

ning its course, the problems caused by the increasing complexity and specialization in organizations 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 problemsthat 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. 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 madeearly 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...