Here, we post occasional reports on recent activities. Archived TSL newsletters can be found below.
TSL @ INFORMS 2025
What a fantastic week at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting!
A couple of weeks ago, the TSL community gathered in Atlanta, Georgia for the INFORMS Annual Meeting. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined our TSL events. It was so great to see so many of our members together in one room - celebrating achievements, exchanging ideas, and strengthening the network that drives our society forward.
This year’s program was big: 62 TSL sessions in total with 7 Business & Awards Sessions, 28 TSL Invited Sessions, 20 TSL Contributed Sessions, and 7 Job Market Showcases.
Our community keeps growing - we now have 783 members!
We’re excited about new initiatives as well. The TALENT Workshop, first held in May 2025 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is now formally part of our TSL Policies and Procedures. It is now an official component of what TSL offers - supporting early-career scholars with training, mentoring, and networking opportunities, and will be held in years when there is not a TSL conference (this means our next TSL TALENT Workshop will take place in 2027).
This past May also featured the TSL Workshop in Seoul, and planning has already begun for the 2027 TSL Workshop. We warmly encourage institutions or groups interested in hosting the 2027 workshop to reach out to Marlin Ulmer with proposals due in February 2026.
On the journal side, Transportation Science continues to deliver both quality and speed. With 618 projected submissions this year, most papers still receive decisions within 3-4 months, thanks to the extraordinary dedication of our editors and reviewers.
And we are already looking forward to the next opportunity to come together: The 2026 TSL Conference will take place at MIT in July! Submissions are open until early December.
Thank you again to everyone who contributed to a memorable and inspiring INFORMS 2025. We can’t wait to see you all again soon!
We are excited to celebrate the amazing winners of the TSL Awards in 2025!
- Herman Lifetime Achievement Award: Cynthia Barnhart
- Stella Dafermos Mid-Career Award: Roberto Roberti
- Best Paper Award Winner: Miguel Lejeune & Wenbo Ma
- Best Paper Award Runner-Up: Wei Zhang, Alexandre Jacquillat, Kai Wang & Shuaian Wang
- Dissertation Prize: Fabian Akkerman, Bo Lin
- Student Paper Prize: Haoran Guo
This year, we had the first-ever INFORMS TSL Data-Driven Research Challenge.
TSL and Meituan, a platform offering location-based consumer products and services across entertainment, dining, delivery, travel, and more, partnered to launch this new initiative - giving researchers and practitioners worldwide access to Meituan’s real operational food delivery data to foster data-driven research on real-world challenges.
The response was incredible: 21 submissions, 68 authors from 31 universities across 9 countries, and 59 referees from 37 universities!
🏆Congratulations to our Winner Team:
Data-Driven Optimization for Meal Delivery: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Order-Courier Assignment and Routing at Meituan
Ramon Auad, Felipe Lagos, Tomas Lagos
👏 And to our Runner-Ups:
The Meal Delivery Routing Problem with Courier Behavior and Graph Neural Networks
Niels de Jong, Ilke Bakir Kees, Jan Roodbergen
Dispatch or Hold? An Offline Learning and Online Optimization Approach for On-Demand Delivery
Long He, Yihua Wang, Zhenglin Qi, Stefan Minner
A huge thank-you to all participants, referees, and committee members for making the first TSL Data-Driven Research Challenge a success!