Engr. Bonn Kleiford Seranilla took the first place in the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR (Operations Research) student paper competition during the annual INFORMS Conference held in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA last October 2022.
INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR (Operations Research) is an annual student paper competition which honours exceptional projects in the field of operations research and management science conducted by a student with societal impact. It is sponsored by INFORMS, the leading international association for professionals in Operations Research, Analytics, Management Science, Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and other relevant fields, Bonn triumphed against finalists from world-renowned universities - Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University - taking home the winning prize.
Bonn’s project, titled “Optimizing Vaccine Distribution in Developing Countries under Natural Disaster Risk”, focuses around the creation of Project FALCON – an optimisation tool aimed at assisting local government units to select optimal facilities for their COVID-19 vaccination rollout plans through a multi-stage stochastic facility location model and a novel approximate dynamic programming algorithm exploiting an approximate linear penalty.
Project FALCON is endorsed by the XU-Social Development Cluster to the United States Agency for International Development - Strengthening Urban Resilience for Growth with Equity (USAID-SURGE) Project. The tool was implemented in the city of Cagayan de Oro, which posted the highest vaccination rate in Region 10 by the start of 2022, inoculating more than 89% of the target population.
Bonn is currently a faculty member of the Industrial Engineering Department at the College of Engineering and a PhD student, advised by Prof. Nils Löhndorf (also the co-author of the project) at the Luxembourg Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL) at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. His paper can be accessed here: https://optimization-online.org/2022/09/optimizing-vaccine-distribution-in-developing-countries-under-natural-disaster-risk/