A Part-Time Comprehensive Course in Operational Research-Experience at the Rutherford College of Technology

A 3-year part-time comprehensive course in operational research was inaugurated in 1964 by the Rutherford College of Technology and Procter & Gamble Ltd., administration and lecturing being shared between them.The College gained a new post-graduate school and the Company a relatively inexpensive method of increasing the technical competence of its management systems staff. Other industrial organizations in the North-east benefited by being able to train operational research scientists relatively inexpensively.The syllabus is given and experience of the first 3 years' operation is described.     

Operational Research and the Universities

University staff may contribute to operational research by developing and refining its special techniques, or by becoming involved in operational research projects; they may investigate practice to guide them in their research, or in the training of operation analysts. The universities are, in many ways, ideally equipped for operational research work, but involvement in long-term consulting activities is not without serious problems of its own.     

英国运筹五十年：成就、困境和出路

英国是运筹学的发源地,五十年来对运筹学的创立,发展和推广起了重要作用,但到九十年代,情况起到了很大变化;运筹工作小组大量关闭;运筹学系基本消失,运筹工作另谋出路,为此,英国运筹学会拨出专款进行调研,组织专家讨论,在国际期刊上发表调研报告和讨论专辑,分析当前运筹学的困境和未来的路向,本对此进行介绍和探讨,希望对社会-经济转型时期的中国运筹学界和运筹工作有借鉴作用。     

Practical Vehicle Routeing Using Computer Programs

This article gives an account of a trial by a large company of VANPLAN, Scicon Consultancy's Vehicle routeing computer package.It covers the various logical stages in the trial of project design, data collection and validation, staff training and acceptance criteria.The article also highlights the advantages of using computers interactively to plan routes using the skills of existing staff. This is compared with the ‘traditional’ operational research approach using automatic routeing algorithms. Suggestions are also made regarding how to properly and fully test new routeing algorithms or techniques.     

A Survey of Operational Research in British Industry

This paper surveys the recent development and present position of operational research in British industry. It makes a critical examination of the relationship between the techniques available and the types of problem on which they are deployed; it surveys the type of people now carrying out operational research and comments on career opportunities. The paper also considers the integration of operational research within industrial organizations and suggests ways in which it can be related to other management services.     

Optimal preventive maintenance scheduling of thermal generating units in power systems —A survey of problem formulations and solution methods

Preventive maintenance scheduling of thermal generating units occupies a significant place in power system operation and expansion planning; at the same time it is a challenging optimization problem. The purpose of this paper is to analyse essential features of the maintenance scheduling problem, including imposed constraints and various objectives, as well as to present the results of the research work done in this field using operational research methods. Papers published during last fifteen years are discussed, with special regard for the applied optimization techniques.     

An alternative tactic to deal with the contingency of driver absenteeism

On any given workday, unexpected absence of drivers calls for emergency operational tactics to ensure completion of planned deliveries of merchandise to customers. A typical tactic in the workforce scheduling literature is to rely exclusively on a pool of workers who were not scheduled for work; that is, full-time off-duty drivers and part-time drivers. Concerns about the expense of maintaining a staff of part-timers prompt consideration of alternative tactics. This study proposes one such alternative. It minimizes the part-time pool by reassigning routes among drivers who show for work. In multi-route vehicle routing problems, the prospect of this alternative arises because cost-minimizing patterns of travel distances across routes often allow one driver to do extra work by handling more than one route (subject to time-window and workload constraints). By considering costs such as overtime rates when drivers perform extra (emergency) driving duties and the cost to maintain part-time staff, this study tests the efficacy of the aforementioned alternative. Its efficacy is confirmed by the fact that it is less costly than the typical tactic: while the typical tactic adds just over 22% to driver payroll, the proposed alternative adds a noticeably smaller cost of just under 15%.     

Operational Research and the Behavioural Sciences

Operational research has set for itself the general goal of providing solutions to management problems. In view of this the authors assert that operational research has paid scant attention to work in the behavioural sciences in devising its approaches to problems. This omission can be serious. It can also be remedied, at least in part, and it is the purpose of this article to lay a foundation for such a remedy.     

Spreading the gospel of management science: operational research in Iron and Steel, 1950–1970

This paper builds on the author's earlier work on the history of operational research by presenting an analysis of the development of the discipline in Iron and Steel, an industry long regarded as one of the outstanding pioneers in the application of management science to decision-making processes. The contribution of Sir Charles Goodeve and BISRA to the diffusion and practice of operational research is well-documented. Less well known is the reaction to operational research within the managerial hierarchies of the private sector iron and steel companies. In the light of the development of dedicated operational research groups by the leading companies after 1950, it might be assumed that the industry was highly receptive to the discipline in terms of its perceived benefits. The present paper questions this assumption by highlighting the problems encountered by operational researchers in two of the largest Iron and Steel Companies which gave every appearance of being at the forefront of the practice of management science in British industry. Where appropriate, the paper draws contrasts and comparisons with the development of operational research within the nationalised Coal Industry.     

Education for Operational Research. A Practitioner's Viewpoint

University education for operational research in Britain is making great and welcome strides forward, but there has been little open discussion of its aims in relation to the advance of the profession. Progress in operational research, and in its application to the really worth-while problems of industry in particular, depends primarily on strengthening the industrial operational research group in its “front line” role. We need a research study of the teaching and practice of industrial operational research, in relation to effectiveness. We need “collaborative” programmes of operational research education in which the university and the industrial operational research group each contribute, in a man's training over a period of years, in the ways in which each is most competent. We need emphasis on “breadth” as well as “depth” in operational research education, and greater attention to the mutual contributions of operational research, teaching and practice, and the teaching and development of management. An impressionist sketch of a programme which might meet these needs is put forward for discussion of principles and feasibility.     

Health visitors revisited

Cambridgeshire Area Health Authority commissioned a team from the University of Aston Management Centre to carry out an operational research project in order to assist in planning the provision of health visitor services in Peterborough health District. Since Peterborough is a Development Area there has been a rapid increase in population which it is planned will continue for some years. This change in size and age-distribution of the population poses considerable problems for planning the provision of health visitor services.Health visitors are trained nurses who have highly independent roles in the National Health Service. They are largely concerned with preventive work, traditionally with children and increasingly with the elderly, in which it is difficult to set quantitative objectives and measure outputs.This paper will describe the research plan and the models developed. Considerable attention will be paid to the relationship of the research team to the client system, consisting of the Area and District managers and the individual health visitors. The implications of this type of study in extending the practice of O.R. will be considered.     

The Use of Operational Research in Twelve Companies Quoted on the Stockholm Stock Exchange

The use of OR was studied in 12 companies. Material was obtained through interviews with operational researchers and users. The result shows that coordination and production problems are the most common application areas. Network planning and simulation have often been used. Most projects cost less than $$\$$$6000 and require a work input of less than 4 man-months. The operational researchers are mostly located in staff positions and independent of any specific line function. The opposite is true for the users. If the company is divided into five levels, most operational researchers and users are located at the third level. A university degree in engineering is characteristic both for operational researchers and users with the operational researcher younger than the user.     

Operational Research in Chile

Since the beginning of 1963 SIGMA has had a team of operational research scientists working for Compañía de Acero del Pacífico, one of the largest steel-makers in South America. The task has been to demonstrate the value of operational research to the company by solving a series of both tactical and strategic management problems and also to train some of the company's own engineers to form an effective internal operational research team.The company has allowed us to publish the results of any of the studies made and this has made it possible to write a complete story describing not only the work done and the successes, but also the difficulties that were encountered and the mistakes that were made. This article is not intended therefore to demonstrate yet further applications of well-known techniques nor to develop original problem-solving methods; rather it is to come out in the open and reveal the really difficult practical problems that face almost any operational research men and show how we attempted to solve them.     

Policy analysis and organizational politics

It is widely recognized that the formulation and implementation of policy is a ‘political’ process. Yet this aspect of policy and policy making remains rarely explicity included in the analysis and models of the professional policy analyst. Where political aspects have been considered the emphasis has tended to be upon the legitimated political arena rather than internal organizational politics. It is our concentention that to ignore the internal political dimension is to decrease significantly the effectiveness of the policy analyst in aiding and influencing the policy-making process. The purpose of this article is to explore this concentention and specifically to discuss a particular approach to policy analysis derived from it. It is one which involves the construction of models for the policy maker as client that are importantly different in nature from typical rational-scientific models of operational research. The models deliberately attempt to successfully capture his attention and commitment because they reflect the ramifications of his political organizational environment as well as the more legitimate technical aspects of his problem. The conceptual framework and methodology that underlie this approach use concepts and methods drawn from ideas in cognitive psychology and sociology and political science, as well as operational research. The paper discusses these perspectives and points to potential uses of the models we have constructed by providing examples derived specifically from work we are currently undertaking in the public sector.     

Reflections on queue modelling from the last 50 years

Queueing theory continues to be one of the most researched areas of operational research, and has generated numerous review papers over the years. The phrase ‘queue modelling’ is used in the title to indicate a more practical emphasis. This paper uses work taken predominantly from the last 50 years of pages of the Operational Research Quarterly and the Journal of the Operational Research Society to offer a commentary on attempts of operational researchers to tackle real queueing problems, and on research foci past and future. A new discipline of ‘queue modelling’ is proposed, drawing upon the combined strengths of analytic and simulation approaches with the responsibility to derive meaningful insights for managers.     

A Manpower Planning Study

The paper describes a technique which has been applied in practice to predict the movements of the staff of a large undertaking over the next 20 years. The exercise shows the future promotion pattern and the recruitment required to fill the posts which become vacant as a result of promotion or wastage.By feeding in alternative assumptions about the future demand for staff in each department, corresponding to different levels of business activity, it is possible to see in advance which situations are likely to give rise to the greatest staff problems.It is thought that the same basic technique could be used for manpower planning in other firms.     

基于POT方法的商业银行操作风险极端值估计

对于商业银行而言,操作风险已经成为与市场风险和信用风险同样重要的风险。本文利用极值理论超越样本的估计能力,采用极值理论中对数据要求量较少,可以进行单步预测的超阈值(POT)方法对我国商业银行操作损失极端值分布进行估计,以均值超额函数图和拟合直线的交点确定阈值,估计出给定置信水平之下操作风险损失的分位数,从而使得国内商业银行操作风险监管资本的计算成为可能。     

The Evaluation of Possible Alternative Forging Techniques

This paper describes the early stages of a long-term operational research project which is concerned with increasing the efficiency of the forging industry. The aims of the work have been to provide a yardstick by which individual forges can judge their own efficiency; to provide information which will indicate which lines to follow to effect improvements; to assess the likely effects of current research; and to evaluate possible future lines of research.The first two aims have been satisfied by comparative studies, and the second two by a process of "breakdown and synthesis". A characteristic of operational research in a field such as this, is the need to acquire an understanding of the technology of the processes involved.     

Expert Systems and Operational Research-Mutual Benefits

The aim of much operational research and expert systems work is similar-helping a decision maker do his job. Liaison will produce mutual benefits. Expert systems development will benefit from the experience of operational research. The operational research community is well placed to support and develop the use of such systems by management.