Page 11 - DCOM303_DMGT504_OPERATION_RESEARCH

Operations Research

Notes 1941 Onward

In 1941, an Operational System Section (ORS) was established in Coastal Command which was
to carry out some of the most well-known OR work in World War II.
The responsibility of Coastal Command was, to a large extent, the flying of long-range sorties
by single aircraft with the objective of sighting and attacking surfaced U-boats. Amongst the
problems that ORS considered were:

1. Organization of flying maintenance and inspection: Here the problem was that in a
squadron each aircraft, in a cycle of approximately 350 flying hours, required in terms of
routine maintenance 7 minor inspections lasting 2 to 5 days each and a major inspection
lasting 14 days. The question, which needs to be answered, was how can flying and
maintenance be organized to make best use of squadron resources?
2. Comparison of aircraft type: The problem was one of deciding, for a particular type of
operation, the relative merits of different aircraft in terms of factors such as: miles flown
per maintenance man per month; lethality of load; length of sortie; chance of U-boat
sighting; etc.

3. Improvement in the probability of attacking and killing a U-boat: In early 1941 the attack
kill probability was 2% to 3%. It is in this area that the greatest contribution was made by
OR in Coastal Command.
Although scientists had been involved in the hardware side of warfare i.e. designing better
planes, bombs, tanks, etc. scientific analysis of the operational use of military resources had
never taken place in a systematic fashion before the World War II. Military personnel were
simply not trained to undertake such analysis.

By the end of the war OR was well established in the armed services both in the UK and in the
USA.
Following the end of the war OR took a different course in the UK as opposed to in the USA. In
the UK many of the distinguished OR workers returned to their original peacetime disciplines.
As such OR did not spread particularly well, except for a few isolated industries like iron, steel
and coal. Whereas, in the USA, OR spread to the universities to begin systematic training in OR.

Did u know? The importance of Operations Research in India was first felt by Prof.
Mahalanobis when he used OR techniques in the formulation of the second five year plan for
forecasting the trend in demand and availability of resources. Planning commission made
use of OR techniques for planning the optimum size of the Caravelle fleet of Indian Airlines

1.5 Applications of Operations Research

To give an idea of the application areas in which OR can be applied, given below are abstracts
from papers on OR projects that have been reported in the literatures. All these projects are
drawn from journals published in recent past.
Note that, at this stage of knowledge of OR, you will probably not understand every aspect of
these abstracts but you should have a better understanding of them by the end of the course.

 Managing consumer credit delinquency in the US economy: a multi-billion dollar
management science application: GE Capital provides credit card services for a consumer
credit business exceeding $12 billion in total outstanding dollars. Its objective is to optimally
manage delinquency by improving the allocation of limited collection resources to

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