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Introduction: 2006 Franz Edelman Award for achievement in operations research and the management Sciences.

Article Excerpt
This special issue of Interfaces is devoted to the finalists of the 35th annual competition for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the profession's prestigious award for the practice of operations research. R. John Milne, chair of the competition, and Stephen C. Graves, editor of this special issue, provide an overview of the competition and introduce the finalists.

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It was a privilege and an honor to serve as chair of the 35th annual international competition for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. This is the fourth decade of a competition that has matured into our profession's most honored award for the practice of operations research.

This Franz Edelman Award competition was held on May 1, 2006 at the INFORMS Practice Conference in Miami, Florida. The diversity of difficult problems conquered by innovative operations research (OR) was impressive. The five finalist teams applied OR to solve problems in airline security, animal antibiotic use, product distribution, e-tailing, and the repair of military aircraft.

The Franz Edelman Award Competition is jointly sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. The purpose of the competition is to draw out and recognize outstanding examples of OR/MS practice. The award is named in honor of Franz Edelman, who established the OR group at RCA, one of the earliest industrial OR/MS groups in North America. He worked for over 30 years at RCA and is among the fathers of innovation in OR and management science.

The prizes are awarded for implemented work that has had significant, verifiable, and preferably quantitative impact--not for the papers submitted nor for the presentations describing the work. INFORMS presents trophies commemorating the prizes to the client organizations that used the finalists' work and presents medals and cash awards to the finalist authors. This year, the prize money totaled $14,000 with $10,000 going to the first-place winner. More important, all finalists have the honor and satisfaction of knowing their work has been recognized by their peers as the best in the profession. In addition to having their efforts described in this special issue of Interfaces, all finalists will have their presentations documented in the Edelman DVD series produced by INFORMS and available for sale at www.informs.org/Edelman.

The Edelman Award process takes the better part of a year, beginning with a call for abstracts in early September of 2005. The number of people supporting the Edelman competition is large. To name them all would be difficult, but I thank them all for making the competition a success. I especially appreciate the hard work of the verifiers, coaches, judges, and the Edelman Award gala committee.

The verifiers work behind the scenes to validate the claims made by the entrants that the Edelman committee has identified as...

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