The 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, for the very first time, took place in virtual form.
It included 36 TSL-sponsored sessions that had been pre-recorded. This was compared to 61 sessions in 2019 and 58 sessions in 2018. Due to the special circumstances, no Plenary session was organized. Special thanks go out to the cluster chair Joseph Chow (NYU) and vice chair Neda Masoud (UMich) as well to the SIG chairs and vice-chairs Sandra Eksioglu, Sasha Dong, Changhyun Kwon, Samitha Samaranayake, Debjit Roy, Jennifer Pazour, Qing He, Terry Yang, Andrew Churchill and Lavanya Marla.
During the business meeting, we congratulated the new TSL officers for 2021: president-elect Jan Fabian Ehmke, Air SIG Vice-Chair Brunos Santos, Secretary and Treasurer Niels Agatz, as well as Justin Goodson as INFORMS Cluster vice-chair for the Annual Meeting 2021.
For his outstanding contributions to the TSL community, Maciek Nowak (Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University of Chicago) received the TSL Service award.
There were 30 outstanding nominations for the TSL dissertation prize this year. The prize was awarded to Ohad Eisenhandler (Tel Aviv University) for his work on “Humanitarian Pickup, Gleaning and Distribution Problems” as advised by Michal Tzur. An honorable mention went to Alexandre de Macedo Florio (University of Vienna) for his work on “Models and solution methods for stochastic vehicle routing problems” as advised by Richard F. Hartl.
The TSL Best Paper Award 2020 selected the best paper in terms of originality, methodology, and practice from 29 candidates. The award went to Rosario Paradiso, Roberto Roberti, Demetrio Laganá and Wout Dullaert for their work on “An Exact Solution Framework for Multitrip Vehicle-Routing Problems with Time Windows”, which was published in Operations Research. An honorable mention was given to Shubhechyya Ghosal and Wolfram Wiesemann for their paper on “The Distributionally Robust Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem”, also published in Operations Research.
Furthermore, the SIG Freight Outstanding Paper Award went to Yadong Wang and Qiang Meng for their paper on “Semi-liner shipping service design”, which was published in Transportation Science. The SIG Urban Transportation Paper Award went to Yixiao Huang, Lei Zhao, Warren B. Powell, Yue Tong, and Ilya O. Ryzhov for their paper on “Optimal Learning for Urban Delivery Fleet Allocation” as also published in Transportation Science. Jelmer P. van der Gaast, René B. M. de Koster, Ivo J. B. F. Adan, and Jacques A. C. Resing received the SIG Facility Logistics Paper Award for their paper on “Capacity Analysis of Sequential Zone Picking Systems”, published in Operations Research.
Due to the current COVID-19 situation, the cross-regional grant of $3,000 was not awarded.
The doctoral grant of $3,000 was awarded to Juan Carlos Piña Pardo (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile) for visiting Matthias Winkenbach (MIT) to work on Multi-echelon Last-mile Delivery with Drone Resupply.
Furthermore, the TSL society members agreed to establish a new prize to highlight excellent research published in the flagship journal Transportation Science. Each year in April, members of the Transportation Science Editorial and Advisory Boards will nominate up to three papers published in the preceding calendar year to be awarded the Transportation Science Journal Paper of the Year prize. The paper with the highest number of nominations wins. In case of ties, the prize is split. The winner(s) will be announced at the TSL business meeting that year.
Last but not least, we congratulate Karen Smilowitz as next editor-in-chief of Transportation Science.
We also look forward to the TSL Workshop 2021, which will be organised by Niels Agatz, Shadi Sharif Azadeh, and Remy Spliet at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The workshop's theme will be “Behavioral aspects in transport and logistics”. As the global pandemic situation is still uncertain, the workshop's implementation as either virtual or in-person will be decided and announced in January 2021.