Operations Research has been applied in a great many fields. The historical application areas listed below are represented by INFORMS Communities, specialized journals, entries in the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, and other taxonomies.
The image above (courtesy ofFrePPle bvba) was chosen to represent OR application areas because it shows, on the manager's chart, one of the earliest non-military applications studied in OR. Inventory management was the subject of seminal papers and books in the early 1950's by Kenneth Arrow, Theodore Harris, Jacob Marshak, Samuel Karlin, Herbert Scarf, Jack Kiefer, Jacob Wolfowitz, and Aryeh Dvoretzky. Inventory management has evolved to deal with supply chain management and many other logistical concerns.