Excellent students awarded: smarter planning under uncertainty for maritime transport

At the end of January, The Norwegian Operations Research Society (NORS) held the 3rd NORS Master thesis prize award seminar and ceremony at SINTEF, Oslo.

A community of researchers and practitioners within Operations Research

Since the start in 2014, SINTEF is active in the board and as member in NORS. NORS is an organization that gathers a community of researchers and practitioners based in Norway, whose discipline -Operations Research (OR)- deals with the application of advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions.

Award to master thesis on smarter planning under uncertainty for maritime transport

The NORS Master thesis award was handed out to Sofie Smith Vågen and Jørgen Bjaarstad Nikolaisen for their excellent work on improving maritime routing inventory under uncertainty. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Peter Schütz, and written at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Mangement at NTNU.

In their thesis, that was handed in in summer 2019, Sofie and Jørgen have developed an optimization-simulation framework for a tactical Maritime Inventory Routing Problem under uncertainty faced by a global aluminum producer. The aim was to find shipping schedules performing well under uncertain travel and port admission times. Therefore, an iterative feedback framework was built combining simulation with two optimization models. The results of the computational study show that the solutions found using the framework perform significantly better under uncertainty than the optimal deterministic solutions.

• See last years winners of the Master Thesis Prize here.

Highly praised by the NORS scientific committee

The thesis was praised highly by the NORS scientific committee for the rigorousness of their work. The thesis was well-structured and organized, with innovative aspects in both modelling and algorithms. The developed methods are highly relevant for maritime logistics and the results provided solid support for the potential practical impact of their work.

In addition to their well-written Master thesis, Sofie and Jørgen have presented their work in the seminar with the same rigour and professionality as the thesis before receiving a well-deserved applause.