Glossary
Operations Research Analyst Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential operations research analyst terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key operations research analyst vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in operations research analyst training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Constraint
- Limit on solutions.
- Decision variable
- Choice in a model.
- Forecasting
- Predicting demand.
- Heuristic
- Rule of thumb solution.
- INFORMS
- Professional society.
- Integer programming
- Optimization with whole numbers.
- Linear programming
- Optimization with linear equations.
- Monte Carlo
- Random simulation.
- Network optimization
- Optimizing routes.
- Objective function
- What to maximize or minimize.
- Optimization
- Finding the best solution.
- Prescriptive analytics
- Recommending actions.
- Queueing theory
- Math of waiting lines.
- Sensitivity analysis
- Testing changes in inputs.
- Simulation
- Modeling a system over time.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Operations Research Analyst practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Operations Research Analyst training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.