What is OR?  FrancaisFrançais     DeutschDeutsch     ItalianoItaliano
Operations Research (OR) is a scientific approach to analyzing problems and making decisions. Its goal is to provide rational bases for decisions making by seeking to understand and structure complex situations and to use this understanding to predict system behavior and improve system performance. OR plays important roles in a large variety of industries. Here we briefly describe two classical problems in OR:

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)
In this problem we are given a collection of cities as well as the distance of traveling between each pair of them. If a salesman starts at city A, the TSP consists in finding the shortest round-trip the salesman can make such that he visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city A.

Example:
 TSP example
Figure 1: An instance of the travelling salesman problem and a tour of length 26, which is the minimum possible in this case.

Frequency Assignment Problem (FAP)
A set of wireless communication connections (or a set of antennae) must be assigned frequencies such that data transmission between the two endpoints of each connection (the receivers) is possible. The frequencies assigned to two connections may incur interference to one another, resulting in quality loss of the signal. The FAP consists in assigning frequencies to the connections such that the interferences are as small as possible.

More information and examples of applications of OR can be found on the following websites:
www.hsor.org
www.roadef.org
www.orsoc.org.uk
www.ifors.org
www.euro-online.org