The INFORMS Section on Location Analysis (SOLA) announces the 2023 Student Paper Competition. The award is given biennially for student papers judged to be the best in the broad field of facility location. We encourage papers that promote the development of analytical methods, techniques and tools in the tradition of operations research/management science (OR/MS) as applied to the study of facility location.
All finalists will be invited to present their paper in a SOLA Best Student Paper Competition session during the INFORMS Annual Meeting. The SOLA Best Student Paper Competition winner will receive a plaque during the SOLA Business Meeting at the annual conference.
Eligibility Criteria
- Applicant must have been a student anytime between Jan. 1, 2021 - December 31, 2022.
- The research was conducted during the time the applicant was a student.
- The submitted paper must present original research conducted primarily by the student applicant.
- The applicant does not need to be the first author, but the applicant's contribution to the paper needs to be more than 50%
- The applicant or applicant's primary research advisor must be a member of the SOLA on the date of submission
- The paper must not be a part of a dissertation that won the first-place award in the SOLA Dissertation Award Competition.
Submission Requirements:
- A summary file containing the applicant's and applicant's primary research advisor's contact information, abstract, appropriate keywords for the submitted paper.
- A letter from the primary research advisor discussing the applicant's contribution to the paper and whether the applicant meets the eligibility criteria
- The paper in anonymous form with a length of at most 35 pages including the appendix, tables, figures, and references, and compliant with submission formatting standards similar to that of the leading INFORMS journals. The file name should be the short title of the paper.
The above three documents (in pdf format) should be sent to sheng.liu@rotman.utoronto.ca. Complete applications should be received on or before July 31, 2023. If you have any questions related to the competition, please email sheng.liu@rotman.utoronto.ca.
2023 Committee Members:
Francisco Saldanha da Gama (University of Lisbon)
Sheng Liu (University of Toronto, Chair)
Wei Qi (Tsinghua University)
Award recipients
- 2023
- Winner: Weiliang Liu, National University of Singapore, “Robust Data-Driven Design of A Smart Cardiac Arrest Response System”
- 2021
- Winner: Sheng Liu, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, “Urban Bike Lane Planning with Bike Trajectories: Models, Algorithms, and a Real-World Case Study”
- Finalists: Aditya Malik, Concordia University, “Exact Solution of Stochastic Dynamic Facility Location Problems with Probabilistic Service Levels on Delivery Times” and Gita Taherkhani, University of Waterloo, “Robust-stochastic Models for Profit Maximizing Hub Location Problems”
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- 2019
- Winner: Jessica Rodriguez-Pereira, Technical University of Catalonia, Exact Solution of Several Families of Location-Arc Routing Problems.
- Runner-ups: Xufei Liu, University of South Florida, Exact Robust Solutions for the Combined Facility Location and Network Design Problem in Hazardous Materials Transportation and Gita Taherkhani, University of Waterloo, Benders Decomposition for Profit Maximizing Hub Location Problems with Capacity Allocation.