Management Engineering and Management Sciences students have once again won top prizes at the Canadian Operations Research Society (CORS) student paper competition. They presented their papers at the 2021 CORS conference, held remotely.
Theodore Morissette, Eric Entz, Razi Sayed, and Andrew Veldhuis came in first in the undergraduate category. Their paper, titled "A Vehicle Routing Problem for Livestock Feed Distribution", was based on their capstone design project. The team had previously also won a 2021 Dematic Capstone Design Award. The project was supervised by Prof. Houra Mahmoudzadeh and Prof. Hossein Abouee Mehrizi. Papers based on Management Engineering capstone projects have now won the top prize in this category 6 times in the last 7 years!
Graduate students also had a great showing at the competition. Aliaa Alnaggar, a PhD student, was runner-up and received honorable mention in the open category for her paper “Heatmap design for crowdsourced delivery”. Aliaa is co-supervised jointly by professors Jim Bookbinder and Fatma Gzara.
Finally, Gohram Baloch was a finalist in the open category for his paper “Risk based allocation of COVID-19 critical supplies and equipment under limited supply”. The paper is co-authored by professors Samir Elhedhli and Fatma Gzara. This is the second time that Gohram makes the finalist list, after previously winning an honorable mention in 2018.