Operations Research

Operational Research or scientific management is a scientific approach for the resolution of the complex problems of management. It wants to be a powerful tool to the decision-maker which helps him to make his decisions in a rational and systematic way. So, the O.R is the application of the methods of science to managements of the great systems of the men, the machines and materials, money, in industry, the businesses, the government, and defense. The distinctive approach consists of developing a scientific model of the system incorporating risks with which we can predict and compare the results of the decisions, strategies in alternative control. The goal is to help the decision-maker to determine his scientific actions and policies.

To the first view, Operations research (or the operational research) is a recent technique, dating to most of World War II. And, in fact, it is well to its application to the military operations that it owes its name. But really, it is a lot older. Since the XVIIs Century, Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat, inventors of the notion of expectation of a random variable (1654), looked for, followed by Jacques Bernoulli, to solve problems of the decision in the uncertain situation. In the XVIIIs century, Monge Gaspard solved analytically a combinatory economic problem: one of them releases the clutch and embankments (1776)