INFORMS, the leading international association for professionals in operations research and analytics, has selected six finalists for the 47th annual Franz Edelman Award for Achievements in Operations Research and Management Science, the world’s most prestigious award for achievement in the practice of analytics and O.R. 

For more than four decades, winners of the Edelman Award have been recognized for transforming how we approach some of the world’s most complex problems. This year’s finalists are no exception, with revolutionary contributions to the broadcasting, health, communication, inventory management, vehicle fleet management, and alternative energy industries. In all, finalists for the Edelman Award have contributed to a cumulative impact of over $250 billion since the award’s inception.

The finalists for the 2018 Edelman Award are:

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). China’s natural gas consumption has nearly doubled over the past five years. To better meet demand, CNPC, China’s largest oil and natural gas producer and supplier, partnered with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Tsinghua University to develop and implement a new software that optimized the country’s natural gas pipeline. Previously, all annual planning for CNPC, which controls 75 percent of the country’s natural gas resources and pipeline network, was manually conducted using spreadsheets. However, the increasing complexity and size of China’s natural gas pipeline meant the previous method had large measures of error, increasing costs and wasting resources. Since implementing its new systems at the end of 2014, CNPC has realized approximately $330 million in direct savings for CNPC, and the increased efficiency of the pipeline has enabled it to delay further pipeline expansions saving billions of additional dollars.

Europcar, the leading European car rental company that provides rental services to more than 5 million drivers annually, partnered with ACT Operations Research to create Opticar – an advanced logistics management solutions for tackling the many factors that impact the car rental industry each day, such as the need for vehicles at airports and hotels and customer requests for vehicle upgrades. The system can also anticipate future demand for Europcar’s fleet of vehicles, up to six months in advance, improving capacity management. In addition, the Opticar system enabled Europcar to optimize its approach to revenue management, providing a new, more stable pricing system for its vehicle rentals that takes into account competitor pricing, what vehicles are currently available, and expected demand for vehicles.

The Federal Communications Commission recently completed the world’s first two-sided auction of valuable low-band electromagnetic spectrum, reclaiming channels from TV broadcasters to meet the exploding demand for wireless services. The Commission purchased spectrum from TV broadcasters, sold the acquired spectrum to wireless providers, and assigned the remaining broadcasters to new channels in a smaller TV band. Operations research tools, including optimization software and satisfiability solvers, were essential to the spectrum clearing target calculations, auction winner determinations, and final TV channel assignments. The auction repurposed 84 MHz of TV spectrum for wireless use, raised nearly $20 billion in revenue, paid over $10 billion to winning broadcasters, provided nearly $2 billion for relocation costs for non-winning broadcasters, and contributed over $7 billion to reduce the federal deficit. The final channel assignments, which included all 2,900 U.S. and Canadian TV stations, enabled 78 percent of the stations to remain on their existing channels, providing an estimated savings of more than $200 million in relocation costs.

Intel, which employs more than 100,000 people in over 70 countries around the world and has an annual revenue of $60 billion, implemented a fully automated Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) based inventory target-setting system managing $1 billion daily in finished goods inventory representing over $40 billion a year in sales. Algorithm-derived inventory targets at Intel are accepted by planners +99.5 percent of the time and have simultaneously driven higher customer service and lower inventory levels resulting in over $1.3 billion in gross profit since 2014. In addition, customers are delighted: since MEIO was implemented at all of Intel’s vendor managed inventory hubs in 2012, customer satisfaction has never been higher and Intel has landed in the top-10 of Gartner’s Supply Chain Top-25 every year. Faculty in the department of Business Analytics and Statistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the supply chain software company Logility also contributed to this project.