The Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) Annual Conference 2019 took place in Saskatoon, Canada, on May 27-29, 2019. A number of Management Sciences faculty members and students attended the conference. Their research was well-received and recognized at the conference.
Undergraduate Awards
A Management Engineering student team took home the top prize in the CORS Student Paper Competition (undergraduate category). Milan Preet Kaur, Mandeep Hanspal, Jui Dhaval Champaneri, and Sathana Srikanthan presented a paper titled Optimal Re-allocation of Pay and Display Machines for Toronto Parking Authority, based on their senior (capstone) design project. 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, they found that the city can save millions of dollars while maintaining customer service levels. The project was supervised by Prof. Houra Mahmoudzadeh.
Management Engineering students Milan Kaur and Jui Champaneri present their work at CORS conference
Another team of Management Engineering students were selected as finalists in the competition. As part of their capstone design project, Laura Arrizza, Caroline Davey, Gordon Lau and Melanie Roy, supervised by Prof. Bissan Ghaddar, build a system to assist Meals of Wheels London to generate matching and transportation schedule of volunteers participating in the organization's Meals for Wellness program.
Graduate Awards
Danielle A. Ripsman, a PhD student in Management Sciences won first prize in the CORS Healthcare Special Interest Group Student Presentation Competition for the work: Warm-Started Robust Direct Aperture Optimization for Cancer Treatment Planning. Supervised by Prof. Houra Mahmoudzadeh, Danielle uses advanced optimization techniques to find optimal radiation therapy treatment plans for cancer patients. Her models consider all delivery constraints of the clinical treatment devices and therefore her optimal plans can potentially be directly implemented by clinicians. She shows that these optimization models are extremely complex to solve, and proposes new rapid high-quality approximations for solving these models.
Milad Dehghani Filabadi, a Masters student in Management Sciences was selected as one of three finalists in the CORS Student Paper Competition (open category) for the work: 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 paper proves that the proposed robust optimization models ensure the feasibility, reliability, and security of the system in the face of potential fluctuations in the amount of predicted wind power. He is co-supervised by Prof. Sahar Pirooz Azad and Prof. Houra Mahmoudzadeh.
Faculty Recognition
Congratulations to Prof. Stan Dimitrov for becoming the president of CORS (2019-2020).
The next CORS conference - CORS Annual Conference 2020, which will take place in Toronto in June 2020, will be chaired by Management Sciences professor Fatma Gzara.