Problem structuring in OR practice

Abstract

We are conducting a novel analysis of the OR literature with a view to understanding something of the breadth of approaches to problem formulation that are found in published OR work. We make use of probabilistic topic modelling to construct a classifier that can identify texts that are strongly associated with the fields of Problem Structuring Methods, Community OR and Behavioural OR – even if not labelled as such through keywords, titles or abstracts – as exemplars of work that address key problem formulation concepts. We draw on Callon’s notion of problematisation as the theoretical basis for our analysis because it sits outside of OR and thus provides a different perspective on problem formulation and insight into the “abundance of problematisations” that face any OR practitioner engaging with real-world problems.