Gerardo Berbeglia Receives the Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Applied Mathematics in Canada

July 16, 2010

Gerardo Berbeglia (PhD 2010) has won the 2010 Cecil Graham Award for the best doctoral dissertation in applied mathematics defended at a Canadian university in the previous year. The award, created by the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS), will be presented at the Society’s Annual Meeting, to be held from July 17 to 20 this year at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The winner receives a commemorative plaque, a $1,000 prize and one-year membership in the Society. He will also be invited to give a lecture at the Annual Meeting.

Gerardo’s thesis, entitled Complexity Analyses and Algorithms for Pickup and Delivery Problems, deals with pickup and delivery problems in vehicle routing. Such problems have wide applicability in practice, including demand-responsive transportation systems, elevator dispatching, and bicycle-sharing systems. The thesis contains several far-reaching theoretical and algorithmic contributions in the context of both static and dynamic problems. For instance, the author shows and mathematically defines the difficulty of counting solutions to the Travelling Salesman Problem and routing problems with partial routes. He also uses constraint programming and tabu search to obtain practical results to demand-responsive problems.

The dissertation was co-directed by Jean-François Cordeau, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Logistics and Transportation and Full Professor with the Department of Logistics and Operations Management, and Gilbert Laporte, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management and Full Professor with the Department of Management Sciences.

Remember that another HEC Montréal PhD student, Alysson Costa, also won the Cecil Graham Award two years ago.