Soft OR and Practice: The Contribution of the Founders of Operations Research

“Soft Operation Research and Practice: The Contribution of the Founders of Operations Research” explores two themes relating to the 43 people whose profiles constitute the Assad and Gass book referred to in the article. First, it explores the direct influence of the founders on the development of so...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Operations research 2021-05, Vol.69 (3), p.727-738
Main Authors: Dyson, Robert G., O’Brien, Frances A., Shah, Devan B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition & reasoning
Management science
mixed modeling
Operations research
OR Practice
philosophy of modeling
practice
problem structuring
professional
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:“Soft Operation Research and Practice: The Contribution of the Founders of Operations Research” explores two themes relating to the 43 people whose profiles constitute the Assad and Gass book referred to in the article. First, it explores the direct influence of the founders on the development of soft operations research (OR) and the alignment of their work with the characteristics of soft OR. Second, it explores how many key early developments of OR stemmed from the founders’ engagement with practice. It is argued that the affinity of the founders with soft OR and with its emphasis on process in the framing and formulation of problems should therefore be universally recognized as a legitimate branch of OR within its practice and evidenced within its publications. It is additionally argued that all academics should see engagement with practice as a fertile source of stimulation and ideas. This paper explores the work of some 43 founders of operations research. In particular, it considers the links between soft operations research (OR) and these founders. Several of the founders were direct influencers of the soft OR proponents, whereas others related to the context, process, and content of soft OR. Coupled with the deductive and inductive reasoning approaches of soft OR, it is argued that soft OR is a legitimate branch of OR. The paper also focuses on the embeddedness of the founders, and the soft OR proponents, in practice and argues that, for academics, engagement with practice has been and will continue to be an important driver for the health and development of operations research.
ISSN:0030-364X
1526-5463
DOI:10.1287/opre.2020.2051