New graduates of the Department of Industrial Engineering Nazlı Akar, Başak Kepir, Çağıl Koçyiğit, Işıl Koyuncu, Melis Beren Özer and Tunca Türkoğlu have been awarded the 2013 INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize for their IE 477-478 System Design project entitled “Flight Scheduling Optimization and Automation for AnadoluJet” conducted under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Bahar Yetiş Kara. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest professional society in the world for individuals in the field of operations research, management science and analytics.
The Undergraduate Operations Research Prize Competition is held each year to honor a student or group of students who conducted a significant applied project in operations research or management science and/or original, important theoretical or applied research in operations research or management science while enrolled as an undergraduate. The submissions vary from single-authored theoretical research papers to applied projects conducted by student teams. The overwhelming majority of submitted papers have been of exceptional quality, with a few being published in highly-regarded academic journals.
A prize of $500 and travel support to attend the INFORMS annual meeting are awarded each year to the coauthor(s) of the winning paper, who share the prize and travel support. The Bilkent students, who traveled to Minneapolis in the US for this year’s meeting, received additional travel support from the university and Turkish Airlines with the help of University-Industry Collaboration, Practice and Research Center (USİM) Coordinator Yeşim Erdoğan.