Shen Named Runner-Up in ICS Competition.

HANOVER, MD (September, 2010): Ph.D. student Siqian Shen was announced as one of two runners-up of the 2010 INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Student Prize for the best paper on computing and operations research by a student author. Her paper, “Expectation and Chance-constrained Models and Algorithms for Insuring Critical Paths,” was co-authored with her advisor Dr. J. Cole Smith and Georgia Tech professor Dr. Shabbir Ahmed. They consider a class of two-stage stochastic optimization problems arising in the protection of vital arcs in a critical path network. The decision maker must trade off costs incurred in insuring tasks with uncertain finishing times against expected penalties associated with late project completion times. They provide decomposition strategies and employ mixed integer programming techniques to solve this problem with respect to either convex or nonconvex penalty functions, and also cast this problem as a chance-constrained problem. The paper is scheduled to be published in the forthcoming issue (Vol. 56, Issue 10, October 2010) of Management Science. A student from the University of Maryland was declared the winner, from 20 entries. The winners will be recognized at this year’s INFORMS Annual Conference in Austin in November.