Bikey Seranilla took home the prestigious Doing Good with Good OR prize at the annual INFORMS conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA in October 2022. The Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance and the Luxembourg Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL) congratulate Bikey on his outstanding achievement.
Bikey wins Doing Good with Good OR competition
INFORMS, the leading international association for professionals in operations research, analytics, management science, economics, artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics, and other relevant fields, has once again sponsored the “Doing Good with Good OR” competition to encourage student research and practice with societal impact.
The Student Paper Competition, which is held yearly identifies and honours outstanding projects in the field of operations research and management science conducted by a student or student group. LCL PhD Student Bikey Seranilla prevailed against finalists from Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University and placed first, taking home the prize.
Bikey’s project, titled “Optimizing Vaccine Distribution in Developing Countries under Natural Disaster Risk”, centers 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.
The tool was implemented in Bikey’s hometown of Cagayan de Oro City, a highly urbanised, flood-prone city in the Philippines, which posted one of the highest vaccination rates in the country by the start of 2022, inoculating more than 89% of the target population. “This project was my way to contribute personally to helping in the fight against COVID-19,” explains Bikey.
LCL Director Prof. Benny Mantin underlines the meaning of this achievement not only for Bikey but also for the LCL: “This is a major award. Bikey’s competitors were students from Stanford, Harvard and other Ivy league universities. He really demonstrated that LCL research is best in class”, commented Prof. Mantin.
About Bikey
Bikey joined the Luxembourg Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL) as a fulltime PhD student in October 2019. His research focuses on Multi-stage Stochastic Optimisation in Operations Management’ and is supervised by Prof. Nils Löhndorf. Before joining the University of Luxembourg, Bikey was a University Lecturer in Introductory Operations Research, Human Factors and Ergonomics, and Methods Engineering at Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan, Philippines, where
he also completed his Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering. In 2019, he received his Master’s degree in Management and Optimisation of Supply Chains and Transport from IMT Atlantique in Nantes, formerly known as École des Mines de Nantes.
