The future of OR: Decision support systems and information technology

We discuss the evolution of operations research (OR) since its inception. Recently, the field has been greatly influenced by the electronic revolution, causing the practice of OR to be much more widespread than in previous decades. In the past, in order to address complex problems arising in industry, many OR practitioners have relied on constructing large-scale models and have attempted to solve them using optimization techniques, such as mathematical programming (MP). There is a growing body of opinion questioning whether such an approach, on its own, can deal successfully with many of the complex, ill-defined, difficult-to-model issues now facing OR practitioners. This has given rise to other approaches, such as soft systems methodology, to tackle what Ackoff termed today’s “messes”. We suggest that the attempt to optimize models still has, and will have for a long time to come, a valuable role to play. However, we discuss how the power of MP can be enhanced by incorporating its models and methods within a decision support system which takes advantage of modern information technology. Such a system, containing MP subroutines, can often be used to answe