Past Awards
The Committee was unanimous in selecting the paper "Traffic Delays at Toll Booths" by Leslie C. Edie, appearing in Vol. 2, No. 2 (May 1954) of JORSA. The Committee felt that this paper typified all of the characteristic attributes of what it regards as sound operations research:
(a) The statement of a problem, and its importance, in a real context.
(b) The construction of a cogent quantitative hypothesis, or model, supported by experimental results.
(c) An amount of mathematical sophistication appropriate to the problem.
(d) An assessment of the effectiveness of the implemented conclusions of the study.
These characteristics, together with reproducibility, or the verifiability by independent workers, epitomize scientific method. Edie's paper was the only one which stood high on all of these counts.