Operational Research in the Iron and Steel Industry

The, name Operational Research was coined in the United Kingdom at about the time of the commencement of the Ssecond World War.It was used initially to describe some work by civilian scientists in government service who Were concerned primarily with the introduction of radar to the Royal Air Force to he used to warn of the approach of enemy aircraft.In early days the efficiency with which defending fighter planes could be brought within range of the enenmy was low inspite of the technical reliability of the radar equipment. Clearly what needed looking into and what the scientists proceeded to investigate was the whole warning system which included -- besides the actual radar sets --the various control rooms where information from the radars was assessed and compared with other visual reports from Observer Groups and Police and where decisions were made as to which fighters should he sent to intercept the enemy :the fighter aerodromes where the pilots had to be briefed on the positionof the target and the time of take-off: and acomplicated communications network connecting all these posts. They treated the investigation as a scientific problem. A logical picture was developed, the elements of the problem were isolated & hypotheses were setup on how these elements were connected and how variation in one element might affect another.Then the scientists went into the field & recorded how the various elements performed, & analysed these data to test how closely their logical model tailed with reality. The embryo model was then modified to explain satisfactorily the behaviour of the practical system they had obse-rved.This process of logical description, observation & analysis is the common feature of all scientific method