In engineering, the problem can arise in manufacturing, product design, transportation, telecommunication, environment, construction, pharmaceutical, scheduling, materials planning, and robotics to name a few. In business, the problems can arise in economics, finance, manpower planning, resource allocation, logistics, banking, healthcare, warehousing, and accounting. In the sciences, the problems may arise in medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, agriculture, oceanography, and space. The list of areas of applications is boundless. Operations research is also known as management science in some disciplines.
People trained in operations research are like applied mathematicians.
Operations researchers are trained in the skill of analyzing problems, extracting the main characteristics of the problem, and converting the extracted characteristics to a set of mathematical equations called a model of the problem. The operations researcher will solve the model or experiment with it to obtain a solution or draw some inferences about the actual problem based on the model results. The use of models is at the root of operations research applications. A model is an abstract representation of a real system or problem. A model of a system is built to behave like the real system except that it is not the real system.