operations research – what is it?

“Operations research – what is it?” is the title of a paper by Philip McCord Morse published in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1952. The paper is a transcript of a lecture Morse gave at the conference on Applications of Operations Research in Industry at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, Ohio, November 8-10, 1951. Case Institute of Technology later offered the first degree program in operations research.

Spoiler: Morse declines to define operations research, arguing that “chemistry and physics must have been difficult to define in the early days.” He notes that many definitions of operations research research use the term “quantitative” to reflect its heavy reliance on mathematics. He then goes on to discuss the burgeoning discipline of operations research in great detail.

Morse views operations research as flexible and practical, drawing in all scientific disciplines that existed at the time. He describes operations research as being model-centric and data-driven. In describing operations research, he stresses the importance of:

• collecting data,
• creating mathematical models for prediction and ultimately prescribing courses of action, and
• being experimental, with a feedback loop to continuously improve models to enhance model realism.

Morse describes a general overview of doing operations research. He outlines the process of creating a mathematical model of a physical process, taking care to validate the mathematical model so that it reflects the real process so that solutions to the mathematical model can inform decision-making. He notes that real data informs the creation of mathematical models as well as input parameters, arguing strongly that operations researchers should be familiar with both the data and the application. He alludes to the new discipline of scientific management, where a hands-on approach was common and involved interacting with stakeholders, observing the system, and collecting data.

“The research can only be successful if the operations research group is in frequent, face-to-face contact with the executive in charge of the operation. All the facts about the operations must be available, and usually these cannot be obtained from subordinates. Security restrictions, military or commercial, must not hamper the collection of data”

Morse steps through an example of seeing and attacking German submarines in World War II. The problem started with the British military collecting data on how frequently they were able to attack submarines upon sighting them (40%). The problem became more interesting when the U.S. military also noticed the same observation (40-45%). This led to improved techniques to develop fuses and attack plans, which eventually increased the fraction of sighted submarines successfully bombed to 50%. The next step involved human factors research to train soldiers to better search for aircraft and submarines using their eyes during patrols. All aspects of this application at the time comprised operations research, although human factors and fuse design are now part of other disciplines.

Morse argues that operations research uses other branches of science, including physics, math, biology, psychology, and economics, to solve practical problems. It becomes operations research when it uses data and mathematical models to drive decisions.

Morse notes that game theory was created by operations research groups:

“Operations research has its own branch of mathematics, called the Theory of Games, first developed by von Neumann and since worked on intensively by Project Rand and other military operations research groups.”

A section of the paper is titled “Curiosity unlimited.” While it is evident that Morse views curiosity as an essential part of operations research, what he describes in this section is persistence is solving the problem and the ability to communicate across difference in interdisciplinary teams. He tells an anecdote from his time leading an operations research team in the U.S. military in World War II, when his team made many efforts so that their science-based recommendations would be adopted by military decision-makers.

Morse ends with a discussion of decision-making. Morse does not mention “objective function” although he discusses objectives to practical, mission-oriented problems. It is obvious that he sees the value in operations research in its ability to guide decision-making by harnessing data and using tools from mathematics.

Despite not being given a precise definition of operations research in the article, I left with a sense that early operations research is consistent with the operations research of today.

P.M. Morse (1952). Operations research – what is it? Journal of Applied Physics 23(2), 165-172. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1702167

Related reading:

• on the art of modeling
• operations research was declared dead in 1979
• on George Dantzig, Good Will Hunting, and tackling hard problems