Vol. 41, No. 4, July–August 2011, pp. 389–393
issn 0092-2102 — eissn 1526-551X — 11 — 4104 — 0389
doi 10.1287/inte.1100.0531
© 2011 INFORMS
Model World: On the Evolution of
Operations Research
Saul I. Gass
Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742,
[email protected]
Key words: OR/MS history; OR/MS philosophy; professional.
O
academics, and practitioners. I submit, however, that
OR’s evolution—its initial growth and development—
is due to the training and insight of three WWII
OR scientists. The propelling force was their classical scientific training and their clairvoyant view of
how the new ideas of OR as an applied science could
make a difference in the real world of human decision
making.
ver the last six-plus years, I have been investigating and writing on historical aspects of operations research (OR), trying to understand how the
field—how the profession—originated and arrived
at its current form. OR grew out of activities that
started in Great Britain during the mid and late 1930s,
continued there during World War II (WWII), and
expanded to the United States following the attack on
Pearl Harbor. OR, which was then termed operational
research, began with the British military, aided by
civilian scientists, investigating how the new invention of radar should be deployed and operated in
defending the homeland against the Luftwaffe. Such
joint military and civilian studies, on both sides of
the Atlantic, expanded to antisubmarine warfare, convoy protection, and aircraft bombing tactics with great
success (McCloskey 1987, Kirby 2003, Gass and Assad
2005).
Following WWII, there was no hue and cry for the
methodology and ideas of OR by the civilian world.
Although some recognized this new field called OR,
no private or governmental groups were calling for
its further development and application away from
the battlefield into the greener fields of business and
industry. Thus, to me, it is quite amazing that within
the first 20 years after its birth, OR was established
internationally as an important scientific field, one
that proved itself on the new battlefront formed by
the needs of business and industry. What happened—
what turned things on?
I am aware that today’s view of OR as a science is not the view of some OR commentators,
In the Beginning
First, the physicist Patrick Blackett—the uncontested
father of OR—who, among his other WWII activities,
was responsible for developing new tactics for using
antiaircraft guns and destroying German U-boats. In
Blackett (1950), he discussed whether OR was a science and noted that he subscribed to the first recognized definition of OR. This definition was stated
in 1947 by Charles Kittel, a physicist and US World
War II OR naval analyst, and modified by Charles
Goodeve, a physical chemist, to read: “Operational
Research is a scientific method of providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions regarding the operations under their control”
(Kittel 1947, p. 150; Goodeve 1948, p. 377). Blackett
noted, “there can be no doubt that scientific method
has often in the past been applied to the complex
phenomena of human life and organizations,” and
“university schools of social science, particularly the
London School of Economics, have studied scientifically many aspects of our society” (Blackett 1950,
p. 4). He goes on to say
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If, therefore, operational research is merely the scientific method applied to the complex data of human
society, then, however useful it might be, it certainly is
not new.
I believe this conclusion to be over-simplified and that
operational research, as developed during the war, and
subsequently, has an appreciable degree of novelty. In
my view, the element of relative novelty lies not so
much in the material to which the scientific method is
applied as in the level at which the work is done, in the
comparative freedom of the investigators to seek out
their own problems, and in the direct relation of the
work to the possibilities of executive action. (Blackett
1950, p. 4)
In 1941, Blackett wrote an influential paper in
which he described the OR approach and its early
British military successes; it was circulated to senior
British Naval Staff and to officers in the US Naval
Command (Blackett 1941). One phrase proclaims
Blackett’s philosophy at the time, namely, that the
application of “numerical analysis” could “help to
avoid running the war by gusts of emotion” (Blackett
1962, p. 171).
Charles Goodeve was an OR pioneer during WWII
who, among other activities, worked with Blackett on
the analysis of U-boat attacks and developed methods for degaussing ships to protect them from mines.
Goodeve founded the Operational Research Club in
1948, which eventually became the UK OR Society. He
contributed a paper (Goodeve 1953) to volume 1 of
the Journal of the Operational Research Society of America. In this article, Goodeve, like Blackett, stated that
he felt that the development and application of OR
must be based on the scientific method. He stated
This tool of management—the scientific method—is
not basically a new one but is the same that has been
used in science for many years. In using the tool of
“scientific” method, operational research, however has
shaped its own particular “edges” just as biological science has shaped its own. (Goodeve 1953, pp. 167–168)
Goodeve then discussed some OR applications and
concluded with the statement, “the examples chosen
should be sufficient to show that we have a branch of
science that can claim a wholeness in its own right”
(Goodeve 1953, p. 180).
The physicist Philip Morse, who is considered to
be the father of OR in the United States, organized
and led the first US OR group during WWII—the
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Interfaces 41(4), pp. 389–393, © 2011 INFORMS
Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group
(ASWORG)—described by Morse as a “scientific task
force” (Morse 1977, p. 173). The impetus that caused
Morse’s group to be organized was Blackett’s 1941
paper, “Scientists at the Operational Level.”
Morse adopted the definition of OR put forth by
Kittel and Goodeve. He objected to the view that the
scientific study “of the operations of civilization is the
task of the social scientists, and that physical scientists
should stick to their lasts, turning out more gadgets”
(Morse 1951, p. 192) and cited the WWII experiences
of his group and the British OR groups to bolster his
case. He further stated
This writer is convinced that many aspects of economics and other social sciences will not advance
appreciably until they are subjected to the techniques
familiar to the physical scientist [the scientific method
of investigation of phenomena] 0 0 0 Operations Research
provides an opportunity for scientists to contribute
to a more effective use of our resources of men and
material, while at the same time carrying on research
of scientific importance in applied science. The study
of operations research has the further advantage of
offering career opportunities in industry, either in war
and peace, which could have pronounced influence on
the management of industrial operations. (Morse 1951,
pp. 192, 217)
Morse was a founding member of the Operations
Research Society of America (ORSA) and served as its
first president.
In his autobiography (Morse 1977), Morse describes
his trip to England in November of 1942 and his visits to various groups of scientists recruited to assist
the British military command, especially Blackett’s.
He writes, “These groups had come to be called operational research groups in England; in the United
States we dropped the ‘al’ in favor of the term ‘operations research’ (research on operations) or O/R for
short.” (Morse 1977, p. 192)
Blackett, Goodeve, and Morse were scientists to the
core. Today, no matter how you view the success or
failure or inadequacies of what is now encompassed
by OR, I submit that if these three gentlemen were not
trained in the scientific method and did not impose
the scientific method as the scaffold upon which OR
was to be built, we would in all probability not now
have a viable field of OR.
In addition, if they were not physical scientists—say
they were mathematicians—I believe that OR would
Gass: Model World
Interfaces 41(4), pp. 389–393, © 2011 INFORMS
not have developed—not have evolved—into the integrated field we now have. And, OR would not have
thrived and grown over the past 50+ years into an
internationally recognized applied science and profession. What has happened would not have happened.
The Expansion of OR into
Business and Industry
The first book that integrated OR concepts was Introduction of Operations Research by Churchman et al.
(1957). It starts with
No science has ever been born on a specific day. Each
science emerges out of a convergence of an increased
interest in some class of problems and the development of scientific methods, techniques, and tools which
are adequate to solve these problems. OR is no exception. Its roots are as old as science and the management
function. (Churchman et al. 1957, p. 3)
However, the question remains: After WWII, how
did OR, with no central gravitational force to pull it
together and organize it into a viable mass, come out
into the open and move into industry and business?
Although some pre- and post-WWII activities in
England and the United States recognized that scientific methods could be of value in nonmilitary
areas, no one was clamoring for OR, no central problems of urgency existed, no cadre of trained OR
personnel was available for hire—just about all the
WWII OR analysts had moved back into their civilian activities—and few of the apparent leaders in the
field could make things happen. Certainly, Blackett,
Goodeve, Morse, and others did write and speak
about how OR could be of value in civilian activities.
But how was this to come about? I suggest that OR,
the powerful field as we know it today, came about
by chance, by happenstance, and mainly because of
the luck of having certain people, who turned out to
be the right people, hired at the right time into the
right industrial and business positions.
This is a strange tale—we emphasize and start in
the United Kingdom. We have three principal players: Charles Goodeve, Pat Rivett, and Stafford Beer.
Goodeve became involved in OR because of his WWII
experiences; Rivett and Beer became involved under
strange and unusual circumstances.
Unlike Blackett, who returned to academia and his
home base of physics, and basically dropped out of
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things OR, Goodeve decided not to return to teaching and laboratory research. Instead, he accepted
the position of director of the British Iron and Steel
Research Association (BISRA), the research arm of
the British steel industry, which was formed in 1944.
This was a good match, because Goodeve had established himself as a top-notch physical chemist before
the war; thus, he was an appropriate scientific leader
for directing the future developments of the iron and
steel industry. But, his war-year experiences with military operations had made him an OR advocate and
leader. In 1946, he established the first industrial OR
group in the United Kingdom—possibly the first in
the world, as far as we know—to complement the
ongoing BISRA departments in physics and chemistry. His objective for the OR group was “to apply
the methods of mathematical statistics and allied techniques to the solution of operational problems arising
in the industry” (Kirby 2003, p. 214). He identified OR
with the “scientific method” for its use of the “rigorous logic of mathematics and statistics” to analyze
the data from “controlled experiments or on experiences, the observations of which can be analysed”
(Goodeve 1948, p. 377). Starting with two staff members in 1947, the BISRA OR staff “expanded to more
than fifty in number, approximately 40 of whom were
science graduates” (Kirby 2003, p. 215).
With respect to Goodeve, Rivett noted that if Patrick
Blackett was the wartime “father” of OR, Charles certainly was a “foster parent” and “wet nurse” of “this
baby which was more or less left on the doorstep in
1946” (Rivett 1980, p. 4). How fortunate OR was to
have Goodeve chosen as BISRA’s director (Assad and
Gass 2011, chapter 5).
In 1943, the mathematician Pat Rivett was drafted
into a statistics research group within the British
Ministry of Supply. He worked on quality control and
inspection schemes of ammunition and bomb fragmentation patterns. When the war ended, he stayed
with the Ministry of Supply as a statistician. In 1951,
he saw two newspaper advertisements for positions
at the National Coal Board (NCB), a British public corporation founded in 1947 to operate previously private coal mines and to manufacture and distribute
their products. One of the positions was for a statistician; the other was for the head of the Field Investigation Group (FIG), which was carrying out OR in the
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mining industry. Pat asked his boss about the difference between OR and statistics and was told that OR
is the same as statistics; it just pays more. He applied
for the OR position and got it.
In his paper on the history of the NCB and OR,
Rolfe Tomlinson wrote about Pat’s decision, “a decision that changed the face of operational research
in the U.K. as well as the NCB” (Tomlinson 1971,
p. 5). When Pat joined FIG, it had seven analysts,
which soon grew to 60 to become the then largest OR
group in the United Kingdom. Pat’s contributions to
OR are too extensive to discuss here, but he turned
out to be an enthusiastic and major player. He was
elected president of the OR Society in 1962, received
the ORS Silver Medal in 1968, and was appointed to
the UK’s first university chair in OR at Lancaster in
1963 (Assad and Gass 2011, chapter 26).
The third person to bring OR out in the open in
the United Kingdom was Stafford Beer. After one year
of college, during which he studied philosophy and
psychology, he enlisted in the Royal Artillery in 1944.
Stafford was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers and
transferred to the 9th Gurkha Rifles in India. After
the war, he stayed in India as an intelligence officer
and was given the task of keeping track of all the
military units in the country as it was being partitioned into India and Pakistan. It was a rather complex task—he was responsible for tracking units of the
British Army, Indian Army, Indian state troops, and
the armies of the many maharajahs. Reverting to his
studies of philosophy, he developed a symbolic logic
model of the situation. Later, when he returned to
England and told the story of his logic model, those
listeners who were knowledgeable about OR would
often comment that what he was doing was operational research. Although he remained in the army
until 1949, he became involved in things OR and
became a member of the Operational Research Club.
After Stafford left the army, he took a position with
United Steel as a management apprentice. His exceptional abilities were soon recognized, and he was
given the assignment to develop a production control system for United Steel, after which he was given
the task of organizing an OR group. It was 1955, and
Stafford was 29 years old. When he left United Steel
in 1961 to form a consultancy, the OR group had a
professional staff of 70. Stafford became president of
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the OR Society in 1970. He is known as the father
of management cybernetics (Assad and Gass 2011,
chapter 32).
The three UK OR activities organized and run by
Goodeve, Rivett, and Beer brought OR to the world
of business and industry. I submit that it all happened by chance, by luck, and by the blessings of
the OR gods. Unlike most other scientific bodies of
knowledge (applied or theoretical), the OR enterprises
established by these OR pioneers did not have connections to any age-old or recent university programs,
did not stem from past or ongoing university or
industrial laboratories, and basically had no related
nonmilitary precursors. One is hard-pressed to name
any other applied science that evolved in such a manner, especially over such a short period.
In the United States, similar chance events helped
to set US industry onto OR. Here, we discuss only
one such event. Outside of the military, the first US
OR group was formed at Arthur D. Little (ADL),
the world’s first management consulting firm, which
was founded in 1886. ADL was just down the road
from MIT; its OR activities were influenced by MIT’s
Philip Morse, who was a consultant to ADL. Also,
several members of the ADL staff, who had served
in WWII, were familiar with aspects of OR, especially
the OR work of the Columbia University chemist,
George Kimball, who was Morse’s deputy director of
ASWORG and also an ADL consultant. In a report
written for the US Chief of Naval Operations, Morse
and Kimball described the form, structure, and methods of OR that developed from their ASWORG experiences (1946a, b, 1951). Originally classified as secret,
a declassified version is available (Morse and Kimball
1946b, 1951).
In 1949, ADL decided to form an experimental group to consult and apply OR in industry. Its
first hire was the mathematician John Magee, who
had received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Bowdoin College in 1946. Magee had also
received an MBA in 1948 from Harvard; he had
recently accepted his first post-MBA job as a financial
analyst. The person responsible for OR hiring at ADL,
Harry Wissman, also a Harvard MBA, found Magee
through the Harvard MBA alumni office. After an
interview, in which Magee was first exposed to OR by
being asked to read an unclassified version of Morse
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and Kimball’s Methods of Operations Research, and with
an offer of a 30 percent increase in salary, Magee
joined ADL. Both Magee’s and ADL’s OR work flourished. Magee eventually became president and CEO
of ADL; he was also the 1966 president of ORSA. In
1956, Kimball became a full-time employee of ADL as
scientific advisor and was made an ADL vice president in 1961. Kimball was the 1964 president of ORSA
(Assad and Gass 2011, chapters 8, 33).
These happenings were not atypical. In those early
days, similar chance events influenced many people
to seek OR careers and make major contributions
to the field. In particular, William Cooper, George
Dantzig, Leonid Kantorovich, Harry Markowitz, and
Albert Tucker, to name a few people, played important roles in OR. I believe that OR is rather unique
because it is a science-based profession that evolved
in this manner.
Since the period discussed above, OR has grown
into a respected, worldwide profession. No matter
how the reader would describe the basis of today’s
OR—its form, its substance, its development, and
its application—science or not—algorithm-based or
not—systemic view or not—OR’s recognition and
staying power are attributable to a few OR pioneers—
physical scientists all—who made sure that OR’s
formative years were grounded in the tested and
accepted methods of the scientific method and the
theme of “science comes outside the laboratory”
(Goodeve 1957). And, how did OR come out of the laboratory? By the fortunate positioning of a few enthusiastic practitioners in the right jobs during these early
years. A truly amazing nonfiction scientific story!
References
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