Twenty-five years of applied operations research at ORTEC

Our roots and the roots of many other ORTECcers are in the Operations Research (OR) department of the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Now we employ 450 people with a quantitative background, who generate a turnover in applied OR of about €40 million. By the definitions of accountants this means that we are now a ‘large’ internationally operating company. The title of the paper might suggest that the focus of this paper is the past. However, as we learned from historical scientists, understanding the past is especially important to make better, and better founded, decisions in the future. That is also the objective of this paper: Describing a view on 25 years of applied OR, in order to contribute to a strong continuation of further growth. Worldwide ageing and the strong trend of globalization because of the impressive growth of the economies in India and China, strongly forces the western world to increase productivity. From the Nobel prize-winning work of Solow we know that more than 80% of productivity increase comes from creating and better exploiting knowledge. It is our view that exponential growth of successful applied OR, based on models that indeed represent ‘constructive knowledge’, is needed and attainable. Learning from the past, we describe our views and plans to get there. As a result of aging and the need for higher productivity well-educated OR professionals will remain to have great (probability 1) chances of employment on the labour markets for decades. By elaborating on this, we hope that the paper is also a stimulus for current OR students, and an attracting force for future OR employees who are now working on their future at high school.