The Practice of Management Science

A major purpose of the College on the Practice of Management Science is to promote practice. Thus, one of its objectives is to develop a way to bring to public view good and useful OR/MS activity in industry, commerce, and government.Since there is a general feeling that practitioners do not normally publish their work, an attempt was made to devise a scheme which would provide a continuing positive incentive for publishing practice. Given that personal gain is a strong motivator, the prize competition was devised. By this method we can combine cash reward and professional recognition. Since the entry cost is simply the time to prepare an abstract and have it cleared for release, there is only the question of the level of reward necessary to draw forth reports on a large enough number of significant examples of practice.This edition of Interfaces provides the reader with evidence by which he can judge the achievement of the goal in 1975. The articles included here are edited versions of the presentations which competed for the prize at the April, 1975 ORSA/TIMS joint meeting. They represent the final selection from a group of abstracts which were submitted in response to the call for entries. Specifically, they describe in each case a completed application of Management Science which has had a significant impact on the organization under study. As a result, they constitute a significant addition to the evidence of the value of Management Science in the real world.