The use of multimethodology in practice—results of a survey of practitioners

Abstract

There is now a vast range of techniques and methodologies, both hard and soft, available to the OR/MS practitioner. After a period of concern about methodology choice, ie ‘which method when’, we are now moving towards a pluralistic approach of combining together several methods within an intervention—multimethodology. This paper reports on a survey of OR/MS practitioners to discover the extent of multimethodology usage and which particular combinations are most commonly utilised.

Keywords:

• methodology
• multimethodology
• operational research
• systems
• practice