AT&T's submission was chosen from over two dozen entries representing organizations in industry and government. The seven finalists for the INFORMS® Edelman Award, all of whom were recognized by the award committee, are AT&T; British Telecommunications plc; Dana Corporation Off-Highway Systems Group; IBM; Towers Perrin; the U.S. Department of Energy; and Visteon Automotive Systems. The Edelman Award winner was IBM.
As a leading service provider in the fast-paced telecommunications industry, AT&T foresaw a rapid increase in traffic on its AT&T Worldwide Intelligent Network, which provides voice, data, video, wireless, satellite, and Internet services to over 80 million customers. Network restoration is important because it enables the company to maintain service in the event of network outages. Restoration capacity is expensive, in part due to its capital and maintenance costs.
A joint team consisting of operations researchers, network planners, and managers from AT&T, AT&T Labs, and AT&T Network was set up to improve the network restoration process. In less than a year, the team completed a linear programming tool to optimize restoration capacity allocation. The tool has made major contributions to AT&T's goal of achieving high quality service, while saving valuable resources in an increasingly competitive business environment.
The honored research is entitled "Optimizing Restoration Capacity in the AT&T Network." The authors are Ken Ambs and Dicky Yan, AT&T Network Services; Sebastian Cwilich, Mei Deng, and David F. Lynch, AT&T Labs; and David J. Houck, formerly with AT&T Labs and now with Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies.
The Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences recognizes outstanding work in operations research that has had a significant impact on the performance of the client organization. The award is jointly sponsored by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. This is the 28th year that the prestigious competition has been held.
The judges of the 1998 Edelman competition were Russ Labe, Merrill Lynch Private Client Group, Chair; Joseph Discenza, Wagner & Associates; Howard Finkelberg, BBDO; H. Newton Garber, Garber Associates; Stephen C. Graves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Yoshiro Ikura, Saitech; Peter V. Norden, Columbia University; Rick Rosenthal, Naval Postgraduate School; and Michael Rothkopf, Rutgers University.
All the finalist papers will be published in the January 2000 issue of the INFORMS publication Interfaces.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.