Operations Research applications: Opportunities and accomplishments

About fifty years have passed since the birth of Operations Research (OR) during World War II. As a relatively young, evolving discipline, the fierce debates in our journals and conferences regarding the future of OR are of no surprise and even healthy. Although OR has penetrated into a wide range of application areas, it is still often viewed as an esoteric academic discipline – certainly not a ‘household name’. In this paper, we attempt to demonstrate the impressive impact OR has had since World War II, and to highlight the unprecedented opportunities for OR in future years. First, we discuss opportunities for OR in a sample of diverse application areas, including telecommunications, air transportation, energy, health care, and others. Next, we review significant contributions of OR to numerous, high-impact projects, using the Edelman Award Competition as a data source. Finally, we present OR activities in several corporations that won the ORSA Prize (as of 1995, the INFORMS Prize), in recognition of their effective use of OR through all levels of management decision making.