CORMSIS PhD student wins 2016 OR Society best thesis award

Çağrı Koç, supervised by Tolga Bektas from Southampton Business School and co-supervised by Gilbert Laporte and Ola Jabali from CIRRELT at HEC Montréal, has been awarded the OR Society's Doctoral Thesis Award. He will receive a cheque for £1500 and a presentation plaque, and his name will be engraved on the George Paterson shield. He will also be invited to present his work at the Beale Lecture in February 2018.

Çağrı’s thesis proposes new models and algorithms for problems featuring vehicle routing, locational and environmental dimensions. Such problems are central to the fields of green transportation and city logistics, and are also highly relevant to environmental engineering and transport economics.

From a methodological point of view, the thesis proposes new powerful and robust metaheuristics that outperform previous results on related problems. It provides new managerial insights that can help logistics practitioners guide some of their policies. For example, in the context of city logistics, one finding of the thesis is that it is beneficial to locate distribution centres in the outskirts of cities. It had already been observed that such decisions were justified on the basis of land cost. What the thesis demonstrates is that they are also justified from an environmental point of view.

Çağrı is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at HEC Montréal, and a Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management.