During the past five years an increasing number of experts have become persuaded that the procedures of operations research would be effective in solving some of the problems of the public sector, such as those in urban operations, in public health, and in education, for example. Operations research professionals, noting the success of applications in the industrial and the military sectors, became convinced that many of their methods, such as system modeling, computer simulation, mathematical programming, and the application of the theory of stochastic processes, could be useful in public affairs; indeed, they felt that the public sector urgently needed this kind of assistance. At the same time a growing number of managers of public operations and experts in urban and regional planning became aware of operations research and began to be interested in trying out its techniques.
Operations Research for Public Systems is an attempt to establish communication between the two groups by indicating to the operations research expert the nature of some of the problems in the public sector which might be amenable to present operations research procedures, and by describing to managers and planners of public systems the ways by which operations research could assist them.
