There's still not even a consensus on what the discipline should be called. At some universities, it's industrial engineering, at others, management science. At Cornell, it's known as the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, housed in the ultra-modern Rhodes Hall on the edge of the Engineering Quad. C aggiano recently returned to the Hill to teach after a two-year stint with PeopleSoft, where she worked with corporate customers who had hired the firm to create software for their production systems. Caggiano, who earned an undergrad degree in math at William and Mary before coming to Cornell, did her dissertation on how to schedule production in a circuit board factory in the most efficient way possible, maximizing output while minimizing production time.
Operations research is a field in which close counts for a lot.
Take jury selection, the subject of a recent project by students in the ORIE Master of Engineering program. When calling potential jurors, the court needs enough candidates to fill each fourteen-person panel of twelve jurors and two alternates. After studying data from 3,000 cases in the State of New York Unified Court System and running hundreds of computer simulations, the students concluded that the optimal pool size going into the voir dire process falls somewhere between forty and sixty, depending on whether the court system is primarily interested in not underusing its jurors, or in ensuring there are enough people to form the panel. Similar questions arise across hundreds of fields. Hotel chains hire operations researchers to help them figure out how many rooms to overbook, given that a certain number of guests won't show.