The role of statistics in operations research: Some personal reflections

Statistics has a very important role to play in Operations Research (OR), yet many standard texts relegate it to a subordinate position behind, for example, deterministic optimisation techniques. I argue in this paper that statistics, and statistical thinking, are essential for the OR practitioner operating in the real, uncertain world. Using many examples from my own experience, I demonstrate that statistics is very useful, and indeed essential, when tackling real-world OR problems. Many of these examples have not been published before and will therefore hopefully be of interest in themselves, as well as illustrations of the points I wish to make.

• Publication year

  2009

• Venue

  ORiON

• Publication date

  2009-12-01

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Business, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5784/25-2-77
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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