Managerial models for practice have undergone remarkable growth in the past 50 years. My paper on decision calculus, published in 1970, was both a progress report and a prescription for improvement. This commentary describes why I wrote the paper, my perception of why it has been considered...

The first major experimental comparison of approval voting with regular plurality voting occurred in the 1985 annual election of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS). In approval voting a person votes for (approves of) as many candidates as desired, the winner being the candidate with the...

(This article originally appeared in Management Science, April 1970, Volume 16, Number 8, pp. B-466--B-485, published by The Institute of Management Sciences.) A manager tries to put together the various resources under his control into an activity that achieves his objectives. A model of his...

The National Science Foundation established the Decision and Management Sciences Program (DMS) in 1982. Healthy and growing, DMS is likely to affect OR/MS significantly, not only by providing funds for basic research, but also through its vision of a combined theoretical and empirical science of...

A manager tries to put together the various resources under his control into an activity that achieves his objectives. A model of his operation can assist him but probably will not unless it meets certain requirements. A model that is to be used by a manager should be simple, robust, easy to...

This paper develops a new model for studying multiechelon inventory systems with stochastic demand. For the model we assume that each site in the system orders at preset times according to an order-up-to policy, that delivery times are deterministic, and that the demand processes are stochastic...

This paper extends work previously reported on storage assignment rules for automatic warehousing systems to include interleaving; that is, the sequencing of storage and retrieve requests. Using both continuous analytical models and discrete evaluation procedures, this paper compares the...

We consider a single-product inventory system that serves multiple demand classes, which differ in their shortage costs or service-level requirements. We assume a critical-level control policy, and a backorder clearing mechanism in which we treat a backorder for a lower-priority class equivalent...

In this paper we examine optimal and near-optimal continuous review policies for a deterministic arborescent inventory system: Known and constant outside demand must be met without backlogging or lost sales at minimum average system cost per unit time. Costs are of two types: A fixed order cost...

Most office equipment is maintained by service organizations consisting of teams of service representatives. An important problem for the service organizations is the determination of the spare parts inventory to be carried by each service representative. This note presents a model for finding...