Operations research in communications

Operations research can be of value to the communication engineer by enabling him to set up valid criteria by which to judge the relative advantages of communication systems in specified applications. While in many cases insufficient data are available for an exact analysis or optimization, this approach is superior to the classical method of choosing arbitrary evaluation parameters which may be meaningless in the proposed application. On the other hand care must be taken in the interpretation of the results of an operations research procedure. In the classical approach the system is designed to meet some given specifications and is not optimum in any particular sense. In an operations research approach criteria of performance and effort, plus constraints, are chosen, and the system is optimized with respect to these quantities. However, because of necessary simplifications in both the criteria and the constraints the results are only pseudo optimum with respect to the desired applications. In effect, the ambiguities involved in choosing the specifications of a classical approach may have been exchanged for the ambiguities involved in choosing the criteria and the constraints in an operations research approach. Nevertheless, an operations research approach is desirable because it helps prevent unintentional ambiguities from entering the problem by directly focusing attention on the application as well as the system.