Problem description:

Please help.

Analysis:

What is "operational research"? Its English name is Operations Research, literally translated as "homework research", which is to study how to act in enterprise management activities and how to get the best possible results at the lowest possible cost, which is the so-called "optimization" problem. Chinese is the most abundant language in the world. China scholars translated this subject into "operational research", which is taken from the old saying "strategizing, winning thousands of miles away", which means calculating and planning, making suggestions and winning with the best strategy. This sums up the essence of this subject very appropriately.

In the long river of human history, the idea of strategizing can be seen everywhere, and the classic cases of strategizing are also common. For example, The Art of War is the epitome of China's ancient war strategy; Like Zhuge Liang, he is a well-known master of military operations. However, it is only in recent decades that "operational research" is really studied as a science. In World War II, Britain, the United States and other countries transferred experts from various fields to participate in the optimization research of various strategies and tactics, which achieved remarkable success and greatly promoted the process of victory. After the war, many experts engaged in these activities turned to the people, and quickly extended operational research to all aspects of industrial enterprises and work, thus promoting the research and practice of related theories and methods of operational research, and making operational research develop rapidly and gradually mature.

Today, although operational research has only a history of more than 50 years, its content is quite rich and its fields are quite extensive. Taking the contents of operational research papers collected by the International Digest of Operational Research as an example, there are more than 50 kinds of technical classification. Now the application of this new discipline has penetrated into all fields of the national economy and has become an effective means to promote the rapid, healthy and coordinated development of the national economy.

The application of operational research in China began in the construction industry and textile industry of 1957. Since 1958, it has been applied in transportation, industry, agriculture, water conservancy construction, post and telecommunications and other fields. Especially in transportation, the "map operation method" has been put forward and proved to be scientific in theory. When solving the problem of reasonable delivery route for postmen, Professor Guan Meigu put forward a solution called "China postal route problem" abroad. Since 1960s, operational research has been widely and deeply applied in China's steel and petroleum industries. Since 1965, the application of overall planning method in construction industry and large equipment maintenance plan has made gratifying progress. Since 1970s, the optimization method has been popularized in most provinces and cities in China. In the mid-1970s, the optimization method gained extensive attention in the field of engineering design. He has made great achievements in optical design, ship design, aircraft design, transformer design, electronic circuit design, building structure design and chemical process design. In the mid-1970s, queuing theory began to be applied to the research of ports, mines, telecommunications and computer design. Graph theory has been used in circuit layout, computer design and chemical storage. Storage theory was applied late in China, and it was successful in automobile industry and materials department in the late 1970s. In recent years, the application of operational research tends to study large-scale and complex problems, such as departmental planning and regional economic planning, which has been difficult to be decomposed by system engineering.

As to the direction in which operational research will develop, western operational research circles have been arguing since 1970s, and there is no unified conclusion so far. Here, some viewpoints of the field of operations are put forward for your further study and research reference.

Bond, former president of the South American Institute of Operations Research, believes that operations research should be developed in three fields: operations research application, operations research and operational mathematics, and emphasizes the coordinated development while paying attention to the former two. This is because operational research has formed a powerful branch in the 1970s, and the mathematical description of problems has been quite perfect, but the original characteristics of operational research have been forgotten, and the research on interdisciplinary and solving practical problems has been ignored. At present, a large number of new problems faced by operational research workers are: complex systems where economic, technological, social, ecological and political factors intersect each other. Therefore, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, many logistics experts put forward that "we should attach importance to the study of large-scale systems" and "we should go from operational research management to system analysis". Because the time range of studying large-scale systems may be very long, it must be closely combined with futurology; Most problems are related to comprehensive factors such as technology, economy, society and psychology. In addition to the commonly used mathematical methods, some non-mathematical methods and theories have been introduced into operational research. For example, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) proposed by American logistics scientist T.L.Saaty in the late 1970s can be regarded as an attempt to solve unstructured problems. In view of this situation, P.B.Checkland divided it from methodology. He called the traditional operational research method hard system thinking, and thought it was suitable for solving tactical and technical problems of systems with clear structure, while the systems with unclear structure and people involved in activities should adopt soft system thinking method. With the help of computer, studying the concept and application method of soft system should be a direction of future operational research development.