The CPMS/TIMS Award for Management Science Achievement

Interfaces is again proud to present the prizewinning papers from the CPMS/TIMS Competition for Achievement in Management Science. Key criteria of the competition have always been high impact of the project on the sponsoring organization and transportability—that is, a real potential that the ideas or methods could also be applied elsewhere. This year's winning papers certainly meet those criteria. It is interesting that although it is not a criterion that the work be “state-of-the-art” several of this year's finalists are exactly that. In particular, the Air Products project on truck routing and scheduling uses sophisticated math programming techniques involving Lagrangian relaxation, and the “Assessor” model of management decision systems uses very highly developed marketing models. On the other hand one can't help but be impressed by the impact achieved by Southern Railways with a simple heuristic scheduling algorithm on a complex problem that has never before been discussed in the MS/OR literature. The paper entered by Jim Farrell, “A disciplined stock selection strategy,” was originally a lead article in Interfaces in October 1982; a short update is printed here.

Editorials by: (1) John Lastavica, Chairman, 1983 Prize Competition, (2) Peter J. Kolesar, Columbia University and (3) Gary L. Lilien, Editor-in-Chief.