Dartmouth engineering professor Vikrant Vaze was awarded the Transportation Science and Logistics Outstanding Paper Award in Air Transportation at The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting in Seattle, Wash., earlier this week.

Vaze and his co-author, Alexandre Jacquillat of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), received the award for their paper, “Interairline Equity in Airport Scheduling Interventions,” which was published last year in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science. Theoretical and computational results of this paper showed that under some conditions, airport operators can jointly maximize interairline equity and efficiency to mitigate air traffic congestion.

Professor Vikrant Vaze, second from left, holds his Transportation Science and Logistics Outstanding Paper Award at the INFORMS Annual Meeting with (l to r): Alan Erera, president of INFORMS TSL; Alexandre Jacquillat, co-award winner and MIT professor; and Carolina Osorio, award committee chair.

“I feel delighted and humbled to receive this award,” said Vaze. “The paper looks at the question of how to allocate airport capacity to airlines while being efficient as well as fair. Most interestingly, the paper shows that a carefully designed mechanism would not need to compromise equity to achieve full efficiency; instead we can achieve both simultaneously. We were able to prove this mathematically and also demonstrated it using real-world data from New York JFK airport. I think this was quite a prominent finding which made this research project so exciting to work on.”

The award honors outstanding papers that present innovative approaches for solving complex problems in transportation and/or logistics, with an emphasis on operations research and quantitative methods.

The award comes on the heels of another paper Vaze co-authored that was recently also published in Transportation Science; the authors of that paper developed a solution to delays and disruptions in airline operations, with their model reducing extreme delays by as much as 20–30% on average.

According to its website, INFORMS is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting best practices and advances in operations research, management science, and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making, and outcomes.