Operations Research is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods to make optimal decisions. It began developing in the 1930s and 1940s to help with logistics problems in World War II. Some common application areas of operations research include forecasting, production scheduling, inventory control, capital budgeting, and transportation. The document provides examples of transportation problems and assignment problems, which are types of optimization problems addressed by operations research techniques. It also discusses solution methods for transportation problems like the Northwest Corner method and MODI method.