Many contemporary issues are concerned with automation or mechanization of mental work. Study and improvement of such work formed the basis of the field of industrial engineering. In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution involved mechanization or replacement of human by machine as a source of physical work. Extensive use is made of older disciplines such as logic, mathematics, and statistics, as well as more recent scientific developments such as communications theory, decision theory, cybernetics, organization theory, the behavioral sciences, and general systems theory.
Hence, it is concerned with how managerial decisions are and should be made, how to acquire and process data and information required to make decisions effectively, how to monitor decisions once they are implemented, and how to organize the decision-making and decision-implementation process. The subject matter of operations research consists of decisions that control the operations of systems. This difference, however, has been disappearing as both fields have matured. Operations research was originally concerned with improving the operations of existing systems rather than developing new ones the converse was true of systems engineering. Usually concerned with systems in which human behaviour plays an important part, operations research differs in this respect from systems engineering, which, using a similar approach, tends to concentrate on systems in which human behaviour is not important. Thus, operations research is not a science itself but rather the application of science to the solution of managerial and administrative problems, and it focuses on the performance of organized systems taken as a whole rather than on their parts taken separately. Operations research attempts to provide those who manage organized systems with an objective and quantitative basis for decision it is normally carried out by teams of scientists and engineers drawn from a variety of disciplines. University College Cork, Ireland ( A Britannica Publishing Partner) See all videos for this article Listen to Karen Neville, an information systems professor at University College Cork, discussing (2014) applying operations research to the development of EU-wide systems for crisis management.