Designing a Framework to Assist Multi-Methodology in Operations Research using General Morphological Analysis

Operations Research is a set of methods (methodologies) with the aim of improving decision making in organizations and contains Hard, Soft and Emancipatory schools. Most of the proponents of each school conceive their approaches better than the other schools’ in solving or structuring organizational problems. Nevertheless in the early 1990s an interesting debate in the OR communities emerged around issues concerning the use of more than one methodology (combining them or using parts of them) in the same problem. These scientists attempted to define different kinds of problematic situations and then to determine the proper OR methodology for each problematic situation. They raised their work as “Critical OR” or “multi-methodology” school which is significantly inspired from Hebermas’ theories. So, in this paper we have tried to determine some dimensions for problematic situations according to our domestic organizational problems and then to design a general morphological program to be able of determining the suitable OR methodology as an output for any combination of conditions in a problematic situation as input and to reveal the fields necessary to be improved in OR. Applying such a program will have interesting results for operation researchers.