News > 2011 > Gerardo Berbeglia Wins the 2010 Mercure Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation

Gerardo Berbeglia Wins the 2010 Mercure Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation

April 18, 2011

Gerardo BerbegliaGerardo Berbeglia has won the 2010 Mercure Award for the best doctoral dissertation, with a prize of $3,000. The award was presented at the evening to recognize scholarship recipients on the Honour Roll, on April 11. His was chosen from the 19 dissertations eligible for the award in 2010, including the six finalists.

His dissertation, entitled Complexity Analyses and Algorithms for Pickup and Delivery Problems, was co-directed by Jean-François Cordeau, Full Professor with the Department of Logistics and Operations Management and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Logistics and Transportation, and Gilbert Laporte, Full Professor with the Department of Management Sciences and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management.

His dissertation examines pickup and delivery problems from the angle of various applications in logistics, ambulatory services and robotics. It makes convincing connections between optimization theory and practice and takes the different spheres of optimization into account. In addition, it contains a number of original and far-reaching theoretical and algorithmic contributions in operational research, extending beyond the problems studied.

The jury for the Mercure Award consisted of Professors Georges Dionne (Finance), Hatem Ben Ameur (Management Sciences), and Réal Jacob (Management). The jury members considered the relevance of the subject, the quality of the dissertation, its contributions and subsequent spinoff, the awards and scholarships already received by the candidate and the employment obtained after graduating.

This doctoral dissertation led to seven scientific articles, of which four have been published, two are scheduled for publication and one is being evaluated. The four articles published have garnered 83 citations to date.

Gerardo won the Esdras Minville Award in 2009-2010 for his article entitled “Counting feasible solutions of the traveling salesman problem with pickups and deliveries is #P-complete.”  In 2010, the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society presented him with its Cecil Graham Award for the best doctoral dissertation in applied mathematics defended at a Canadian university. He was also granted a doctoral fellowship from the Fonds québécois de recherché sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT), under its merit scholarship program for international students (PBEEE), 2005-2007. He came in third overall in that competition.

Gerardo Berbeglia is now working as senior researcher for ExPretio Technologies, a revenue management firm headquartered in Montréal.

The other finalists for the 2010 Mercure Award for the best doctoral dissertation:

Arlem Brice Adanhounme, Une analyse institutionnelle de la citoyenneté au travail dans une firme multinationale : le Canada et le Ghana en comparaison
Director: Christian Lévesque
Badye Omar Essid, Essais en macroéconomie financière
Director: Michel Normandin
Alexandre Hocquard, Stratégies de replications et leurs applications en gestion de portefeuille
Co-directors: Bruno Rémillard and Nicolas A. Papageorgiou
Geneviève Jourdain, Le processus d’épuisement professionnel chez les travailleurs du secteur de la santé et ses consequences sur la décision de se présenter au travail, sur la performance et sur l’intention de quitter une profession
Director: Denis Chênevert
Haithem Zourrig, Three Essays on Customer Revenge, Avoidance and Forgiveness Behaviors: a Cross-Cultural Perspective
Director: Jean-Charles Chebat