SOLA Best Student Paper Award

The INFORMS Society on Location Analysis (SOLA) announces the 2021 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 notified by September 1, 2021 and are expected 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 plague during the SOLA Business Meeting at the annual conference.

Eligibility Criteria

  • Applicant must have been a student anytime between Jan. 1, 2019 - December 31, 2020. 
  • 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 byildiz@ku.edu.tr.  Complete applications should be received on or before June 15, 2021. If you have any questions related to the competition, please ask by emailing byildiz@ku.edu.tr.


The next SOLA Best Student Paper Award will be offered in 2023. The announcement for the call for submissions will be made in April 2023 with an anticipated application deadline of June 15, 2023.

Award recipients

  • 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”
    •  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.