The team developed an optimization model that is not only increasing the efficiency of the DOE nuclear weapons complex, but is also proving to be a valuable tool in the efforts of the U.S. Government to significantly reduce the global nuclear danger.
The competition took place in Cincinnati on May 2, 1999.
The team'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.
The Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, operated by the Mason and Hanger Corporation for the U.S. Department of Energy is the nation's only assembly and disassembly point for nuclear weapons. The Pantex/Sandia team developed what is called the Pantex Process Model (PPM) to support production planning and scheduling, to make firm workload commitments, and to reply rapidly and accurately to "what if" questions from its customers.
The PPM provides timely, credible planning information needed to support national strategic nuclear weapons decisions by the highest levels of the federal government. Reliance on the PPM has led to a significant reorganization at Pantex, where the PPM has become the core around which capacity planning is shaped. Pantex's 10-Year Site Plan uses the PPM as its foundation. Pantex customers, like the Department of Energy, and DOE customers, like the Department of Defense and Department of State, rely on the PPM to support critical treaty negotiations and allocate resources across the nuclear weapons complex efficiently.
The honored research is entitled "Swords into Plowshares: Nuclear Weapon Dismantlement, Evaluation, and Maintenance at Pantex." The authors are Edwin A. Kjeldgaard and Dean A. Jones, Sandia National Laboratories; James W. Angelo, Richard D. Hopson, John Hudson, and Terry Holeman, Mason & Hanger Corporation; George F. List, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Mark A. Turnquist, Cornell University.
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.