Thursday, February 09, 2012

Historical background of Operation Research



No science has been even been born on a single day. Operation research is not exception of it. Its root is as old as science and society. Those are roots of operation research extend to early 1800’s. But completely disclosed in 1885 When F. W. Taylor emphasized the application of scientific analysis to the method of production.

After then, in 1914, F. W. lanchester used mathematical equation in the field of forecasting outcomes of military battles. In 1917, A. K. Erlong used queuing theory in the field of production of waiting time for callers using an automatic telephone exchange. In 1924, W. Shewhard used the theory of probability and statistical inference in case of production quality control charge and in 1930 H. C. Levinson used mathematical expression in the field of marketing relationship.

The name operation research was evolved in the year 1940. During Second World War, a team of scientist (Blackett’s Circus) in UK applied scientist method to study military operations to win the world and the techniques thus developed was named as operation research.

Later on, the economic crisis of UK required radical improvement. This resulted in an industrial revolution and the operation research techniques so far developed in defense problems to provide a more vigorous and scientific approach to the problems. After a decade of second world war, operation research techniques was rapidly developed in the field of industrial, academic and government organizations.

After the Second World War, due to high development technology, people used machinery instead of manpower as controller. The new revolution began around 1970’s when electric computers were available in market.

In business sector, from 1950, the operation research techniques were used highly. Not only these, even in America it was introduced as an academic subject. Since then, this subject has been gaining ever increasing importance to the students of mathematics, statistics, commerce, economics etc.

Nowadays, we cannot think any business without operation research techniques.

No comments:

Post a Comment