The Development of Operational Research

Abstract

The emergence of OR as a novel discipline in the years immediately prior to the Second World War was not without precedent, as has been shown in Chapter 2. The application of a scientific approach to management problems had been undertaken previously and, in some cases, had been successfully developed. What OR brought to the fore was a greater degree of sophistication in the methods and techniques used. These enabled a broader class of situations to be tackled than had previously been possible, and as the approach became adopted by industrial and commercial organizations, advantage was taken of this potential. On both sides of the Atlantic the new management tool became established, and by the end of the 1950s the professional and academic discipline of operational research was widely recognized.