Posted on 07/01/2004 5:02:24 AM PDT by BluegrassScholar
To the consternation of his colleagues, Mark Eisner once told a reporter that his discipline "is probably the most important field nobody's ever heard of." Indeed, it's not one that's likely to come up at dinner parties.
"I've been explaining for 40 years what operations research is," says Eisner, who is associate director of the school of operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University. He defines O.R. as "the effective use of scarce resources under dynamic and uncertain conditions." That may sound arcane, but it's pretty much the problem of living -- and certainly the central problem of economic life. O.R. isn't economics, however, though most economists have some O.R. training. It's applied mathematics. Since its origins in World War II to its recent resurgence fueled by the explosion in raw computing power, O.R. has developed analytical models of the tradeoffs and uncertainties involved in problems ranging from inventory management to police deployment, from scheduling sports leagues to determining how many people to call for jury duty.
Taking the kids to Disney World this summer? Operations research will be your invisible companion, scheduling the crews and aircraft, pricing the plane tickets and hotel rooms, even helping to design capacities on the theme park rides. If you use Orbitz to book your flights, an O.R. engine sifts among millions of options to find the cheapest fares. If you get directions to the hotel from MapQuest, another O.R. engine spits out the most direct route. If you ship souvenirs home, O.R. tells UPS which truck to put the packages on, exactly where on the truck the packages should go to make them fastest to load and unload, and what route the driver should follow to make his deliveries most efficiently.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
A good career for you mathematics majors out there.
Sounds like a complicated explanation of a simple relational data base. Our brains do it naturally, some better than others.
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