Problems Addressed With Operational Research
- Critical path analysis or project planning: identifying those processes in a complex project which affect the overall duration of the project
- Floorplanning: designing the layout of equipment in a factory or components on a computer chip to reduce manufacturing time (therefore reducing cost)
- Network optimization: for instance, setup of telecommunications networks to maintain quality of service during outages
- Allocation problems
- Facility location
- Assignment Problems:
- Assignment problem
- Generalized assignment problem
- Quadratic assignment problem
- Weapon target assignment problem
- Bayesian search theory : looking for a target
- Optimal search
- Routing, such as determining the routes of buses so that as few buses are needed as possible
- Supply chain management: managing the flow of raw materials and products based on uncertain demand for the finished products
- Efficient messaging and customer response tactics
- Automation: automating or integrating robotic systems in human-driven operations processes
- Globalization: globalizing operations processes in order to take advantage of cheaper materials, labor, land or other productivity inputs
- Transportation: managing freight transportation and delivery systems (Examples: LTL Shipping, intermodal freight transport)
- Scheduling:
- Personnel staffing
- Manufacturing steps
- Project tasks
- Network data traffic: these are known as queueing models or queueing systems.
- Sports events and their television coverage
- Blending of raw materials in oil refineries
- Determining optimal prices, in many retail and B2B settings, within the disciplines of pricing science
Operational research is also used extensively in government where evidence-based policy is used.
Read more about this topic: Operations Research
Famous quotes containing the words problems, addressed and/or research:
“Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping- coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe a cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.”
—Paul Fussell (b. 1924)
“After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.”
—Helene Deutsch (1884–1982)