The ANPET 2015 scientific production award

1. THE FACT

I am very happy to announce that on last Wednesday, November 11, I went to Ouro Preto, Brazil to get the ANPET 2015 Scientific production award. I won this prize, together with three other fellows from GEMMAH, for the first paper produced in our current scientific research.

2. THE PAPER

The paper title is A MATHEMATICAL MODEL BASED ON OPEN VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM (OVRP) TO THE EMPLOYEES TRANSPORTATION PLANNING BY A CHARTERED BUS FLEET [translated from Portuguese].

It presents a solution to optimize the bus routes and fleets contracted to take employees from their homes to work and vice versa. We won the award because our paper has been selected as one of the best ones on “models and transportation planning techniques” submitted to the XXIX ANPET Congress.

3. THE STORY

To celebrate this achievement, I will tell the story in 6 short steps:

The story started from a draft I have conceived to model the related transportation problem, inspired in the real life scenario;
In an advisory session, I suggested this theme to my former supervised internship Rayane Scárdua as her end-of-graduation-course paper;
In order to give the proper academic bias to the research I have suggested Dr. Rodrigo Rosa as her formal supervisor in this work, as he was a teacher in the same department and University where Rayane used to take her graduation course. Rodrigo promptly joined us in this challenge and, to our complete surprise, we found out that his Master Thesis, presented more than a decade before, had exactly the same theme!
Working on Rodrigo´s supervision and on my co-supervision, Rayane worked hard and developed a formal model to the problem and solved it for a set of instances using CPLEX® Optimization Software Package;
The next step was to show that the proposed method could produce significant savings, if applied to produce bus routes and fleet sizing in a real live problem. That was accomplished collecting real life data and comparing with the solution obtained in the lab. With quite outstanding results, Rayane presented her top scoring paper to finish her graduation course;
The last step was to review Rayane´s paper and test cases and submit it to ANPET 2015 Conference. We counted on Lirielly to help us in this last phase.

Some weeks later … there came the paper approval for the Conference and then the award nomination! Unfortunately Rayane could not attend to the event but the other three members of the team were there, together once more, at that time to get the certificates.

4. THE GRATITUDE

I could not end up this post without expressing my gratitude to Rayane Scárdua, Rodrigo Rosa and Lirielly Vitorugo for giving me the chance of working together with them to produce this awarded paper. Their wise questions and their hard work surely were decisive contributions to this achievement and to my knowledge improvement.

5. FINAL WORDS

But the work does not stop here! On the contrary, it was merely the first paper produced on this subject and it reports just the first outcome. We are now working on a more robust solution, which produces faster results to larger instances, so we will be able to solve the whole set of real live instances…! As Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger catchphrase says …

Jodelson Sabino