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Every day, a company, a local authority, a government department or simply any one of us has to solve organizational problems: finding the shortest route (to go on holiday or visit clients), drawing up a timetable (for teachers at a high school or healthcare staff in a hospital ward), distributing resources (mail or electricity throughout a city), or choosing locations (for building factories or preserving biodiversity)…
In all these examples, the number of possible solutions may be enormous: too large for a person to calculate, yet also too large for a computer to enumerate. Finding the best solution—or at least one that is not too bad—requires scientific methods. At the intersection of mathematics, computer science and economics, operations research (OR) provides modeling methods and tools, often algorithmic, to support decision-making.
Operations research emerged during the Second World War in a military context that gave the discipline its name, but has since spread to every area of society. Modeling tools can represent practical problems as mathematical objects to which specialized solution methods can be applied. For example, the familiar task of drawing an envelope without lifting one's pencil can be modeled in the same way as mail delivery, garbage collection and DNA sequence alignment.
A good model helps identify the best approach to a problem, whether it calls for an optimal or an approximate solution, and apply the appropriate mathematical and computational tools.
