The terms operations research and management science are often used synonymously. When a distinction is drawn, management science generally implies a closer relationship to the problems of business management. The field of operations research is closely related to Industrial engineering. Industrial engineers typically consider Operations Research (OR) techniques to be a major part of their toolset.
Some of the primary tools used by operations researchers are statistics, optimization, probability theory, queuing theory, game theory, graph theory, decision analysis, and simulation. Because of the computational nature of these fields, OR also has ties to computer science, and operations researchers use custom-written and off-the-shelf software.



