It is Christmas time, so lots of people are waiting in line, and talking about it. Naturally, this leads to some OR related articles. Ivars Peterson in his Math Trek column at Science News talks about parking strategies: do you park and walk, or cycle through hoping for a better spot (seems the better is generally the better strategy). And the Birminham News is the latest to talk about Dick Larson’s work on queue behavior.
does a companies operations division have anything to do with operations research…are tehy the self same thing
They are not the same. A company’s operations division might use operations research (for planning or scheduling, or another activity), but the finance division or marketing division might also be involved in operations resarch. Similarly, the business school topic “operations management” is related to “operations research” by they are not synonyms.
Operations research is the use of data and models to aid in decision making. See sites like Science of Better for more details