1. ¹Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
2. ²Seoul National University of Technology, Seoul, Korea

Correspondence: VJ Mabin, Victoria Management School, Faculty of Commerce & Administration, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600 Wellington 6140, New Zealand. E-mail: vicky.mabin@vuw.ac.nz; J Davies, E-mail: john.davies@vuw.ac.nz; S Kim, E-mail: skim@snut.ac.kr

Received October 2007; Accepted June 2008; Published online 8 October 2008.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of a process known as the 'evaporating cloud' (EC) as a way of enhancing OR/MS modelling. While other authors have described the use of the EC process to explore the tradeoffs in a traditional Economic Order Quantity model, this paper demonstrates the use of the EC with a facilities location problem, which was originally solved via mixed integer programming. We relate our findings to OR/MS modelling in general, and argue that the EC could contribute effectively to different phases of the problem-solving process, for example, aiding the problem-structuring phase and helping to find better solutions in many OR/MS modelling situations. We demonstrate that the EC is a valuable tool to use in modelling practice as a problem-structuring tool, as a way of dealing specifically with tradeoffs, and that it can therefore be a useful complement to OR/MS methodology, and contribute to OR/MS practice and teaching.