Article
Emerging Trends and New Frontiers in Community Operational Research
European Journal of Operational Research
(2018)
Abstract
Community operational research (Community OR), and its disciplinary relation, community-based operations research, has an increasingly high profile within multiple domains that benefit from empirical and analytic approaches to problem solving. These domains are primarily concentrated within nonprofit services and local development. However, there are many other disciplinary and application areas for which novel applications and extensions of COR could generate valuable insights. This paper identifies a number of these, distinguishing between ‘emerging trends’ (mostly in well-studied areas of operations research, management science and analytics) and ‘new frontiers’, which can be found in traditions not commonly oriented towards empirical and analytic methods for problem solving, where community-engaged decision modeling represents new ways of generating knowledge, policies and prescriptions. This paper will show how the exploration of emerging trends and new frontiers in COR can provide a basis for the development of innovative research agendas that can broaden the scope and impact of the decision sciences.
Keywords
- Community operational research,
- community-based operations research,
- analytics,
- developing countries,
- systems thinking
Disciplines
Publication Date
July 26, 2018
DOI
10.1016/j.ejor.2017.11.032
Publisher Statement
Revised manuscript
Citation Information
Michael P Johnson, Gerald Midgley and George Chichirau. "Emerging Trends and New Frontiers in Community Operational Research" European Journal of Operational Research Vol. 268 Iss. 3 (2018) p. 1178 - 1191 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/michael_johnson/81/