OR volunteers developed a compart ness measure and a “warehouse-location” heuristic to draw nonpartisan, Constitutional political districts. The heuristic maps compact and contiguous districts of equal population. The minimization criterion and compactness measure is population moment of inertia—the summed squared distances from each person to his district's center. The districting method is particularly useful when legislative impasse or indifference forces courts to intervene. Federal Courts have received a computer plan for possible use in Delaware and have asked for computer districts in Connecticut.

Previously reported research documented the analogue between sales districting and legislative apportionment and described the first applications of computer techniques to the redrawing of sales and service areas. This paper summarizes what we have learned from these seven applications. We emphasize --motivation for re-alignment: Better coverage, fairer work load and change in size of sales force, --criteria for measuring "good" districting: Single, multiple and weighted measures of salesman activity; relationship to sales objectives; and correlation between activity measures, --implementation: Top management involvement and presentation to the sales force, --demonstrated effectiveness of the new alignments.

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The problem of production and employment scheduling may be stated as follows. Given the monthly demands for the product turned out by a factory, what should be the monthly production rates and work force levels in order to minimize the total cost of regular payroll and overtime, hiring and layoffs, inventory and shortages incurred during a given planning interval of several months? This problem has received a classical solution in two papers by Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon (Holt, C. C., F. Modigliani, H. A. Simon. 1955. A linear decision rule for production and employment scheduling. Management Sci. (October); Holt, C. C., F. Modigliani, J. F. Muth. 1956. Derivation of a linear decision rule for production and employment. Management Sci. (January).). These authors assumed quadratic cost functions. Their treatment of the problem will be referred to as "quadratic programming." It appears, however, that in the majority of practical applications and theoretical models the cost functions are assumed to be linear. It, therefore, seems desirable to have a method of solution for the linear case as well. In this paper it is shown that a solution can be obtained by linear programming methods. From the linear programming viewpoint, this paper is of an expository nature. "Management Technology", ISSN 0542-4917, was published as a separate journal from 1960 to 1964. In 1965 it was merged into Management Science.

Selecting research and development projects is always difficult because data for assessment are seldom available. ICI Americas used simple decision trees successfully to screen new product ideas and decide on a major effort in new process research. The new process research model incorporated only 10 variables, making estimation feasible; a visual sensitivity analysis gave management confidence in the model conclusions. The screening model incorporated qualitative selection criteria (for example, quick development, low risk, patentable, low capital, high sales) into a single quantitative expression of expected net present value. ICI Americas used it to select projects from 53 new product ideas. These examples illustrate the value of a logical, simple model even when data are sparse.