OR in practice: Results of a survey in Greece

This paper presents results of a survey on the utilization of OR in tackling complex organizational and operational problems in the public and private sectors in Greece. The survey was addressed to the qualified OR and computer personnel, members of the corresponding scientific societies, and replies to questions concerning users, application areas, techniques used, results and related problems.     

The practice of operational research in Taiwan

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey of operational research/management science (OR/MS) practices in Taiwanese companies. The survey was addressed to the current status and future perspectives of OR/MS in Taiwan. During the spring of 2001, 2000 questionnaires were mailed to the top 1000 domestic manufacturing firms and top 1000 domestic service organizations. These asked questions concerning specific OR/MS techniques being used, application areas of OR/MS, reasons for using OR/MS, reasons for not using OR/MS, difficulties encountered practically, and future perspectives. Results from 262 valid respondents provided several informative findings. Compared with the 1995 survey of Kao et al, it found that the percentage of companies that have used OR/MS techniques increased from 62.7% in 1995 to 76.7% in 2001. Also, the percentage of companies that have never heard of OR/MS decreased from 16.1% in 1995 to 11.1% in 2001. Because of the Taiwan government recently developing educational and training programs in OR/MS, it found that the importance of OR/MS has been recognized by Taiwan companies as an efficient management tool for economic development, and the usage of OR/MS will continuously increase.     

Strategic Level MS/OR Tool Usage in the United Kingdom: An Empirical Survey

A survey of the practitioner members of the United Kingdom Operational Research Society was conducted to identify current levels of MS/OR tool usage at the strategic level. In this paper details of the survey will be outlined, the framework of strategic tasks will be described, and the MS/OR tool usage results for these strategic tasks will be presented and discussed.     

The use of multimethodology in practice—results of a survey of practitioners

There is now a vast range of techniques and methodologies, both hard and soft, available to the OR/MS practitioner. After a period of concern about methodology choice, ie ‘which method when’, we are now moving towards a pluralistic approach of combining together several methods within an intervention—multimethodology. This paper reports on a survey of OR/MS practitioners to discover the extent of multimethodology usage and which particular combinations are most commonly utilised.     

A Survey of the Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques within the OR Society

This paper presents the findings of a survey of the application of artificial intelligence techniques amongst OR Society members. The survey involved sending a questionnaire to one-third of the UK-based members of the OR Society and generated a 26% response rate. The survey investigated general characteristics of the respondents to enable comparison with previous surveys; determined the current and growing use of AI techniques, and in which areas they are applied; and characterized the benefits and constraints of using such techniques.     

Operational research in the UK Ministry of Defence: an overview

The paper presents a survey of operational research (OR) as it is currently used in the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). After a short historical introduction summarising developments since 1945, it identifies the impact which the end of the Cold War has had on defence operational analysis (OA), as the discipline is generally called within MoD, in terms of the problems studied, the technical challenges presented and the techniques employed. The factors, both external and internal, that have led to the MoD maintaining and indeed expanding its OA activity against a background of falling defence budgets are discussed in the context of previously reported research on the survival and success of OR groups.     

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested.     

Operations research practice on logistics management in Taiwan: An academic view

The opinions of logistics educators in Taiwan on OR practices in the domestic logistics industry are explored in this research. In this study, questionnaires were given to 42 pre-screened educators at 10 logistics departments and graduate institutes. According to the 37 valid returned questionnaires, 70% of the responding educators believe the major source of OR techniques in Taiwan’s logistics industry originates from individual employee training, while 92% believe OR is not widely used primarily because companies are unfamiliar with OR techniques. OR techniques were considered helpful in solving problems by 73%. Generally speaking, familiarity with OR techniques is not associated with implementation of OR techniques by educators. Additionally, logistics educators express concern about insufficient training for logistics students in Taiwan. However, they are optimistic about the logistics industry’s willingness to more actively adopt OR techniques in Taiwan in the next two years.     

Integration and Utilization of Management Science Activities in Organizations<Superscript>†</Superscript>

A large-scale field study was undertaken to attempt to improve our understanding of the experiences of operational research and related management science (OR/MS) activities in U.S. industries. Multiple interviews were conducted in 66 major firms. An initial analysis of the data suggests several parameters which might be important to the success of management science activities and which researchers may wish to consider in future efforts at theory building. Examples of such factors are: background of the OR/MS leaders and analysts; succession of leaders; amount of OR/MS exposure in the firm; extent of computer usage in the firm; organizational location; project missions; top management relations; client relations; staff relations; personality conflicts. Selected cases are presented to illustrate the interaction of many of these factors in the reported experiences of several firms. Interface relations are examined with special attention given to data collection and implementation problems. The increasing usage of liaison roles is noted. Further studies are being conducted to compare these U.S. experiences with those of OR/MS activities in other countries.     

A survey of OR utilization in Greece

A recent survey concerning OR utilization in firms and public organizations in Greece showed a rather poor profile. The survey covered 20 big organizations including the National Defense General Staff, national enterprises of public utilities, banks and firms from the textile, cement, oil, construction and other industries. Only a few of these organizations are using OR to a significant degree. The rest reported ‘poor’ or ‘no’ use of OR.Research/implementation problems most frequently appearing in public sector organizations include lack of data, insufficient qualified personnel and unfavorable attitude towards cooperation by affected parties. In private firms, the need for quick solutions and the use of OR analysts in line functions quite often imply the use of a ‘rule of thumb’ rather than a mathematical OR technique. In addition, OR study results quite often do not get implemented. One of the reasons is resistance by the affected parties, considering any proposal for reorganization put forward by other parties as a threat.The use of OR has proven beneficial for the using firm or organization. These benefits, however, are not as great as one might expect, due to the problems mentioned above. The future growth of OR utilization in Greece will depend on developments concerning the education of managers in OR methods, creation of OR groups in firms that will seek solutions to real-world, worth-while problems, publicizing successful OR applications, active support by top management, reforms in the educational system etc. The real push for OR utilization in Greece will come from drastic changes in administrative practices, which are directly related to the socioeconomic developments in the country.     

Overview of OR practice in Taiwan companies

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey of Operational Research (OR) practice in business organizations in Taiwan, Republic of China—a newly industrialized country. Questions concerning the number of OR professionals, specific OR techniques being used, common OR users, reasons for not using OR, and the supporting factors and difficulties encountered in practice were posed to the top 1000 manufacturing firms and top 1000 service organizations. Replies from 249 respondents provide some insight into the use of OR in Taiwan's business organizations. The results are very informative for companies wishing to extend their use of OR and for educational institutions to design better OR curriculum to fit industries' needs.     

How Operational Gaming can Help with the Introduction of a New Technology

This paper describes the OR contribution to the problems related to the introduction of seismic exploration methods into the coal industry. The OR team were able to adapt a well-established operational gaming technique to determine the situations in which seismic exploration is worthwhile and assist in the design of the seismic survey itself.     

Operational research in health services planning

Some of the characteristics which distinguish social planning from planning in the private sector, or in publicly owned industry, are identified. A survey of OR investigations (both tactical and strategic) in the area of health services planning supports the case that the mainstream OR contribution does violence to the nature of the system under study. In particular, problems are formulated in terms of (or transformed into) single objectives, to be optimized; aspects of the social world are subject to wholesale quantification, with resulting distortion; models make implausible data demands; project definition and execution reinforce the ‘scientisation’ of political debate; problems are formulated on the assumption of a single hierarchically powerful decision-maker; and problems are formulated as if they must be solved in toto at one point in time. It is suggested that we should look to the converse of these qualities for new directions in the application of operational research in social planning. Some examples are given of techniques and approaches, drawn both from within health services planning and from other areas, which exhibit these alternative characteristics.     

中国运筹学发展研究报告

运筹学是自20世纪三四十年代发展起来的一门新兴交叉学科,主要研究如何应用数学和计算的理论与方法对社会系统和工程系统做出最优或满意的决策。为了更好地推动中国运筹学及相关领域的研究和应用,学会组织国内运筹学领域的部分专家,并参考了国内外运筹学多个分支代表性人物对运筹学的起源和发展的回忆与评述,共同完成了此报告。报告概述了运筹学的主要特征和方法,简述了运筹学的发展历程,剖析了运筹学研究中的成功经验,综述了运筹学几个主要分支的发展状况,介绍了运筹学中十几个有代表性的难题,展望了运筹学未来发展的方向。希望此报告能引起读者进一步思考运筹学的本质,运筹学是如何成长和将如何发展,并在一定程度上推动中国运筹学更好地发展。     

Combining linear programming and automated planning to solve intermodal transportation problems

When dealing with transportation problems Operational Research (OR), and related areas as Artificial Intelligence (AI), have focused mostly on uni-modal transport problems. Due to the current existence of bigger international logistics companies, transportation problems are becoming increasingly more complex. One of the complexities arises from the use of intermodal transportation. Intermodal transportation reflects the combination of at least two modes of transport in a single transport chain, without a change of container for the goods. In this paper, a new hybrid approach is described which addresses complex intermodal transport problems. It combines OR techniques with AI search methods in order to obtain good quality solutions, by exploiting the benefits of both kinds of techniques. The solution has been applied to a real world problem from one of the largest spanish companies using intermodal transportation, Acciona Transmediterránea Cargo.     

The trouble with the second quantifier

4OR - We survey optimization problems that allow natural simple formulations with one existential and one universal quantifier. We summarize the theoretical background from computational complexity...     

Thoughts on the Use (and Abuse) of OR/MS in the Planning and Management of Development (Or: Can OR/MS Help in the Planning and Management of Revolutions?)

The promises of OR/MS for the planning and management of development have been heralded by many. However, there are also many pitfalls and problems involved in the use of these techniques in less developed countries. This essay examines these dangers and suggests some avenues for research in order to make OR/MS more amenable to the needs of the underdeveloped countries.     

OR/MS research in disaster operations management

Disasters are large intractable problems that test the ability of communities and nations to effectively protect their populations and infrastructure, to reduce both human and property loss, and to rapidly recover. The seeming randomness of impacts and problems and uniqueness of incidents demand dynamic, real-time, effective and cost efficient solutions, thus making the topic very suitable for OR/MS research. While social sciences and humanities literatures enjoy an abundance of articles on disaster management, the OR/MS community is yet to produce a critical mass. In this paper, we survey the literature to identify potential research directions in disaster operations, discuss relevant issues, and provide a starting point for interested researchers.     

The Content of MSc Operational Research Courses: Results of a Questionnaire to OR Groups

This paper presents the results of a survey of practising OR groups in UK organizations. The survey was conducted as part of the review procedures of Warwick University's MSc. in Operational Research. The aim was to elicit the views of OR practitioners as to the desirable content of such a course. The questionnaire was sent to 66 OR groups, of which 45 responded, and covered 75 different topics. As well as presenting the basic results, this paper explores the structure of the responses using factor analysis and attempts to classify the OR groups using cluster analysis. Comparisons are drawn with previous surveys and with the SERC OR panel recommendations.     

Preliminary Findings of a Survey of OR Society Membership

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a survey carried out into modelling. The survey consisted of sending a questionnaire to all members of the Operational Research Society (42% response rate).The survey investigated the structure of the OR Society membership; the educational background of OR Society members; the functional involvement, skill requirements and time division of OR Society members; the frequency of use of modelling areas by OR Society members; the types of computers used by OR Society members, and their involvement with decision support systems and expert systems. Full details of the survey, questionnaires and results are given in the paper.