ABSTRACT
The sciences of operations research, cybernetics, information theory, game theory, and systems engineering-to name only the most important ones-developed in the last two decades, share common approaches and overlap in many ways. This is no surprise if we think about their origin. They all are children of World War II. It started with the enrollment of scientists to solve the novel organizational and technological problems of modern warfare, which exceeded the competence of the military and engineers. The development of radar, the support and supply of continental battlefi elds and the planning of strategies created planning and decision problems that could not be solved with a suffi ciently high guarantee of success using conventional techniques. The results of this scientifi c cooperation are not only new technologies-for example technologies of communication, data processing, or astronautics-but these fi rst efforts also led to new, independent sciences that not only fi nd increasingly “peaceful” applications but also have become important and necessary tools in planning, politics and development. In the USA, for example, there are today tens of thousands of scientists engaged in these new fi elds and several hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year in the promotion and, especially, the application of these technologies.
