"Risk Management for the Tiles of the Space Shuttle" is by M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell of Stanford University and Paul S. Fischbeck of Carnegie Mellon University. It is available online at http://www2.informs.org/Press/SpaceShuttle.pdf
The two professors were finalists in the 1993 competition for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
The annual competition recognizes outstanding examples of projects that change people’s lives. Last year, for example, Continental Airlines and CALEB Technology were recognized for applying a disaster recovery system that showed exceptional resiliency on September 11. In 1992, a team from the city of New Haven and Yale won for preventing AIDS through an innovative needle exchange program.
The paper was originally published in the January, 1994 issue of Interfaces: An International Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The journal’s home page is at http://interfaces.pubs.informs.org
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work 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. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.