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Toward a Philosophy of Operations Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Gerard Hindrichs
Gerard Hindrichs*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University, Operations Research Office, Chevy Chase, Md.
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Extract

What is operations research? What is sufficiently new about it to constitute it a “new science”? And how is it related to philosophy?

1. What it is. MOR's definition, based on Kittel's, runs as follows:

Operations research is a scientific method of providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions regarding the operations under their control (7: 1.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1953 , pp. 59 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1953

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Footnotes

∗

This paper draws exclusively on the “open literature” of operations research—that is, on what practitioners in the “new science” have got into print outside of military, industrial, and governmental security regulations; and within that limitation, on the periodical literature in which they report on and explain operations research to professional groups and to the general public—with one exception: Morse and Kimball's Methods of Operations Research (1950, revised 1951). This book, hereafter referred to as MOR, is the “Bible” of operations research. The references listed are selected. This paper was read substantially in its present form before the Southwestern Philosophical Conference, December 28, 1951, The Rice Institute, Houston, Texas.

References

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(4) Kittel, Charles, “The Nature and Development of Operations Research,” Science, CV, 2719, 1947, pp. 150–3.Google Scholar
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