History of Operational Research:

• Pre world war II developments:

Though significant development of OR happened during World War II, some of the basic techniques were developed before itself: inventory control, queuing theory, and statistical and quality control.

In 1915, Ford Harris developed a simple Economic Order Quantity model to optimize the total cost of inventory system. In 1916 A K Erlang theoretically developed queuing theory.

During the same period, companies were having trouble with quality. The quality inspectors who visited them couldn’t ensure continuous quality. The inspection engineering department of Western Electric’s Bell Laboratory designed control charts for this. They were called Shewhart control charts which were later developed for controlling attributes of raw materials/components/finished products.

• World War II

Britain scientists were compelled to develop ways of utilizing scarce resources in warfare. Not only that, they were deployed onsite to study the scenario and come up with ways to improve the effectiveness of the operation within the limited resource and time. This practice paved way for the present scientific, interdisciplinary approach followed for solving important problems in critical operations.

• Post world war II:

At the end of World War II, the successful techniques used in warfare became industrialized. Most of the companies in America and Britain started employing these techniques to mint money with minimal resources and time. The massive usage of these novel techniques resulted in the birth of Institute of Management Science and Operations Research Society of America.

• Computer era:

While computers were increasingly used, the complexities of operations research techniques were growing exponentially. There was a dire need to fool proof the calculation process and speed it up. The advances in computing technology helped in solving that issue.

• Inclusion of uncertainty models:

Operations Research was considered to be theoretical to a large extent because of its ability to solve only concrete problems all the time. The use of probability theory made the tackling of undeterministic situations more realistic.