Introduction: 2010 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice

Competition for the 2010 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice provided the five finalist papers featured in this special issue of Interfaces . The prestigious Wagner Prize emphasizes quality and originality of mathematical models along with clarity of written and oral exposition. Authors from IBM's Watson Research Center won the competition with their innovative, diverse suite of models to improve critical choices for managing skilled personnel, choices so important in service industries; their models have been implemented in the IBM Integrated Technology Services business. A finalist team from Georgia Tech joined with the US Centers for Disease Control to solve a physician's often challenging problem of creating the best new schedule for a person who misses one or more previously scheduled vaccinations; the team's optimization approach is implemented in software now freely available to American physicians, and in software with Canadian rules soon to be available to Canadian physicians. A team from Kimberly-Clark Latin America and Penn State University developed optimization models to improve production and inventory control; after overcoming slow solution speeds with heuristics that furnish good solutions in minutes, the models have so far been implemented in Kimberly-Clark plants in five countries. A finalist team from the University of Texas at Dallas worked with Blockbuster, Inc. to improve efficiency and speed in Blockbuster's central system to fill orders from the company's numerous retail stores; implementation of the resulting optimization models led to reduced costs and more balanced workloads in the Blockbuster order-fulfillment center where different processing departments compete for shared resources. Finally, an India-based team from GE Global Research developed models to improve the selection of customers who receive special product offers from a GE commercial bank in Europe; the team's diverse models are now helping the GE bank to improve its customer responses.