Monday 5 January 2009

O.R. and waste management2

Another slant on a topic which I referred to in August 2008
One of the responsibilities of editing the International Abstracts in Operations Research is to have an awareness of the areas of application of O.R., and especially those which lead to publications in the academic literature. Someone has said that applications of O.R. should be so good that they can be published in the literature of the application area. And that imposes a high standard for the O.R. scientist, having an ability to work within another discipline to such a high standard that ones work stands up against the peers in that discipline.

So it is interesting to notice that more and more O.R. work is being reported relating to waste management. An IAOR search in the online version produced over 240 hits for "waste AND management", running across many aspects of the subject: location of facilities, vehicle routing and scheduling, capacity planning, multicriteria models for planning a waste management programme, etc. etc.

But comparatively little of this work has appeared in the O.R. literature. It is mostly in the application area. I wonder why?

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