<p>I did a little research. Ready?</p>
<p>From JHU website:</p>
<p>Operations research (OR) is an analytical method of problem-solving and decision-making that is useful in the management of organizations. In operations research, problems are broken down into basic components and then solved in defined steps by mathematical analysis.</p>
<p>From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>an interdisciplinary branch of applied mathematics and formal science that uses methods like mathematical modeling, statistics, and algorithms to arrive at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex problems. It is typically concerned with optimizing the maxima (profit, assembly line performance, crop yield, bandwidth, etc) or minima (loss, risk, etc) of some objective function. Operations research helps management achieve its goals using the scientific process.</p>
<p>Wiktionary</p>
<p>the application of scientific methods and techniques to problems of decision making</p>
<p>From ORChampions website: </p>
<p>The science of better. See [Promoting</a> Operations Research | Defining O.R. clearly](<a href=“http://www.orchampions.org/explain/define_or.htm]Promoting”>http://www.orchampions.org/explain/define_or.htm)</p>
<p>And, the most comprehensive discussion comes from MathWorld:</p>
<p>Operations research is a vast branch of mathematics which encompasses many diverse areas of minimization and optimization. Thousands of books have been written worldwide on the subject of operations research.</p>
<p>The central objective of operations research is optimization, i.e., “to do things best under the given circumstances.” This general concept has great many applications, for instance, in agricultural planning, biotechnology, data analysis, distribution of goods and resources, emergency and rescue operations, engineering systems design, environmental management, financial planning, health care management, inventory control, manpower and resource allocation, manufacturing of goods, military operations, production process control, risk management, sequencing and scheduling of tasks, telecommunications, and traffic control.</p>
<p>Closely related disciplines (with significant overlaps among these) include decision analysis, systems analysis, management science, control theory, game theory, optimization theory, constraint logic programming, artificial intelligence, fuzzy decision-making, multi-criteria analysis, and so on. All these disciplines share the objective of improving a quantitative decision making procedure. The same comment applies to operations research-related business applications such as supply-chain management, enterprise resource planning, total quality management, just-in-time production and inventory management, and materials requirements planning.</p>
<p>Research. It’s not just the second half of our name. </p>
<p>RB</p>