Moeilijk doen als het ook makkelijk kan

One of the main points of criticism on academic research in operations research (management science ) is that there is too much emphasis on the mathematical aspects of the discipline. In particular, the mathematical models that lend themselves to rigorous mathematical analysis are often rough simplifications of the actual decision problems that need to be solved in practice. Moreover, advanced mathematical solution methods may lead to overkill, since sometimes acceptable solutions may already be found by relatively simple ad hoc methods. In this address, we argue that although these observations may be true, this does not necessarily mean that mathematically oriented research is not useful in solving practical decision problems. We believe that the criticism ignores both the role of academic research within the discipline as well as the fact that certain recent successful applications of operations research owe much to mathematically oriented research. We illustrate the usefulness of this type of research by discussing research projects in container logistics and public transport scheduling.