History
As a formal discipline, operational research originated in the efforts of military planners during World War II. In the decades after the war, the techniques began to be applied more widely to problems in business, industry and society. Since that time, operational research has expanded into a field widely used in industries ranging from petrochemicals to airlines, finance, logistics, and government, moving to a focus on the development of mathematical models that can be used to analyse and optimize complex systems, and has become an area of active academic and industrial research.
Read more about this topic: Operations Research
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