What is Operations Research — Katherine B. Adams

Operations research: The most relevant field you have never heard of

Terms like machine learning and big data are now ubiquitous in our daily lives. But have you ever heard of operations research (OR)?

Imagine you were interested in participating in the 1962 contest shown to win the $10,000 prize (equivalent to over $100k nowadays). How would you find the shortest (optimal) route that connects 33 cities across the US? At first glance, it may seem like an easy problem, but there are approximately 9 undecillion (9 followed by 36 zeroes) different ways to draw a tour connecting these cities — yes, that is without visiting each city more than once. Solving this problem by enumerating every possible tour and calculating its total distance is impractical even with the most advanced computers available today.

This is an example of a classic OR problem known as the Traveling Salesman Problem. In the 1960s, it was very challenging to solve even for small instances. Using OR, we can now solve this problem optimally for instances with up to 85,900 vertices (cities)!

OR is an interdisciplinary field that uses data to reach insights that improve decision-making of complex problems. Also described as prescriptive analytics, OR can encompass predictive models to leverage data and find the best course of action to achieve goals. Depending on the problem being tackled, OR allows us to save time, money, and even lives. It does so by employing techniques such as mathematical modeling, statistics, simulation, and optimization.

OR has been around for over 80 years. Although it originated to improve military operations before World War II, it is now used in many applications including (but not limited to) manufacturing, transportation, revenue management, and health care. The availability of data today makes OR more applicable than ever!