Practice notes
In this issue, we include two of a new category of paper— Practice Notes. As trailed in the January issue, Practice Notes relate to Case-Oriented Papers in the same way that Technical Notes relate to Theoretical Papers. So, like a Case-Oriented paper, the typical Practice Note will be short, and will describe a practical application undertaken in an academic and rigorous way, providing insights (and possibly some generalized theory) that other practitioners may find useful. However, a Practice Note may be more one dimensional than a Case-Oriented Paper by either concentrating on only part of the application, or because the aspect of practice being described is only partially complete. A Practice Note will be refereed in much the same way as any other paper submitted to the journal. The concept of Practice Notes was offered to participants at the Young OR Conference (YOR13) held in Bath in 2003, and this has resulted in a group of such papers being accepted for publication. In this issue, the first two of these are presented and there will be more to follow in subsequent issues. Although the concept of the Practice Note seemed to appeal to presenters at YOR13, it is hoped that in the future there will be a steady stream of such papers from various sources.
The two Practice Notes in this issue describe collaborations between university staff and external clients. The first by Harper, Yates, Wilderspoon, Shahani, Bowie and Duff has a health services context, and describes the modelling of cardiac services. The second Note by Anjos, Cheng and Currie, describes a revenue modelling problem arising in the airline industry.
We hope that this new type of paper will be enjoyable to readers and will encourage other authors to describe the work they do in the practice of OR. Our thanks go to Paul Harper, Southampton University, who as organiser of YOR13 co-ordinated the call for Practice Notes from participants.