What is OR

Model Building

G. D. Eppen, F. J. Gould, C. P. Schmidt, J. H. Moore, and L. R. Weatherford, Introductory Management Science, 5th edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 2-24.


The operations researcher when faced with real-world decision or opportunity for process improvement can draw a whole range of analogous modeling situations discussed in both the applied and theoretical operations research literature. Eppen and others, (1998) characterize four steps of the model building process.
  1. Model formulation and model building, the process of taking real-world managerial situations, abstracting them into formulation, and then developing the mathematical terms of a symbolic model;
  2. Analysis of the model to generate results;
  3. Interpretation and validation of model results, making sure that the available information obtained from the analysis is understood in the context of the original real-world situation; and
  4. Implementation, putting the validated knowledge gained from the interpretation of model results to work in real-world decision-making.

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