Management Sciences undergraduate and graduate students took a number of top awards at the recent Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) annual conference held in Saskatoon.
A team of management engineering students came first in the undergraduate category of the CORS Student Paper Competition.
The team used optimization models to re-evaluate the need for pay-and-display machines throughout the City of Toronto, after observing an increase in the use of a newly-introduced Mobile Pay App.
Using mathematical optimization, the students found that the city can save millions of dollars while maintaining customer service levels.
Milan Preet Kaur, left, and Jui Dhaval Champaneri hold their first-place CORS student paper competition award certificates.
Another team of management engineering students was selected as finalists in the competition. As part of their recent Capstone Design project, Laura Arrizza, Caroline Davey, Gordon Lau and Melanie Roy, built an automated system to help Meals on Wheels London improve service planning and efficiency. The team was supervised by Bissan Ghaddar, a management sciences professor.
Graduate awards
Danielle A. Ripsman, a management sciences doctoral student, won first prize in the CORS Healthcare Special Interest Group Student Presentation Competition for her work titled Warm-Started Robust Direct Aperture Optimization for Cancer Treatment Planning. Supervised by Mahmoudzadeh, Ripsman uses advanced optimization techniques to find the best radiation therapy treatment plans for cancer patients.
Milad Dehghani Filabadi, also a management sciences doctoral candidate, was selected as one of three finalists in the CORS Student Paper Competition (open category) for his work titled A Robust Optimization Approach for Partially-Ineffective Uncertainty Sets with Application to Power Dispatch.
Milad proposes new methodologies to incorporate uncertainty in modelling electricity power dispatch problems. He considers systems with integrated renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines, and develops mathematical models that account for uncertainty in the amount of available wind. His graduate supervisors are Sahar Pirooz Azad, a management sciences professor, and Mahmoudzadeh.
Faculty involvement in CORS
Stan Dimitrov, a management sciences professor, was elected president of CORS for a one-year term.
The next annual CORS conference, which will take place in Toronto in June 2020, will be chaired by Fatma Gzara, also a management sciences professor.