Scientists from the Chair of Railway Operations have won this year's prize in the INFORMS Railway Applications Section (RAS) in two competitions. The awards in the Railway Applications Section are intended to promote networking between those involved in railroad operations and the academic world and to promote the potential for increasing the productivity of railroads through the application of operations research techniques.

The following scientific papers were awarded:

Student Paper Competition

• 1st place: Peiran Han for his publication on “Integrated Optimization of Train Makeup Problem and Resource Scheduling in Railway Shunting Yards: A Hybrid MILP-CP Approach with Logic-based Benders Decomposition”
• 3rd place: Dr. Christopher Szymula for his publication on “Combining Mixed Integer Programming with Row Generation for Railway Network Capacity Assessment”.

Award for Dr. Christopher Szymula with 3rd place in the “Student Papers” competition of the Railway Applications Section (RAS)

© Maurice Krauth

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Problem Solving Competition

• 1st place: Peiran Han, Yun Hu, Yuwen Pan, Ranfei Zheng and Xiaojie Luan for their innovative research on “A Novel Reward-Driven Integer Programming Approach for Optimizing Railroad Flat Yard Switching: A Sequential Decision Approach.”

In addition, Felix Rauschert, Lukas Bodi (Chair of Big Data Analytics in Transportation) and Maurice Krauth received an award for their research on “Optimizing Rail Shunting Operations through Multi-Stage AI Heuristics.”

Peiran Han is a doctoral student at Beijing Jiaotong University and is currently a visiting researcher at the Chair of Railway Operations.

We would like to congratulate the award winners and wish them every success in their future research work.