The meta-model of OR/MS

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to discuss the relevance of Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS) models to the planning and control process in management; and (2) to suggest a meta-model and a meta-modeling approach to facilitate the identification of the characteristics of a problem and the selection of the appropriate model for solving it. The approach used here is conceptually founded, and its objective is to provide a framework for presentation of OR/MS models to a potential user independently of mathematical derivations. An incidental result is that OR/MS models can be related to other disciplines, such as economic equilibrium theory and statistical inference.