Best Paper Award and Best Student Presentation Award at 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting

ESD

DATE

30 Oct 2025

During the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting held from 26 to 29 October, SUTD was honoured to receive two recognitions from the Air Transportation Section, namely the Best Paper Award and the Best Student Presentation Award.

Best Paper Award
Our paper “An optimization approach for the terminal airspace scheduling problem” (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2024.104856), which won the Best Paper Award, presents an innovative optimisation framework combining mathematical programming and heuristics (matheuristics) to enhance aircraft sequencing and scheduling in terminal airspace operations.

The main author of this paper, Ng Jyn Wayne, is currently a Research Fellow at the Aviation Studies Institute (ASI) and alumni of ESD PhD programme (Class of 2025) and BEng (ESD) programme (Class of 2020). Co-authors of the paper are Wayne’s PhD supervisor, ESD Assistant Prof Nuno Ribeiro, and Assistant Prof Diana Jorge from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon.

Assistant Prof Nuno Ribeiro (right) receiving the Best Paper Award on behalf of the team from Prof Li Lishuai (President of the Air Transportation Section of INFORMS, Professor at City University of Hong Kong) and Assoc Prof Felipe Delgado (Chair of the Best Paper Award, Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile).

Best Student Presentation Award
Our current second-year ESD PhD student, Koh Chuan Shen Marcus, received the Best Student Presentation Award for his work “Towards Efficient Aircraft Turnaround: A Mesoscopic Model for Equipment Routing and Scheduling”. Marcus is developing optimisation algorithms that integrate with video analytics to detect bottlenecks in real time and automatically assign ground vehicles to turnaround tasks — envisioning a future of autonomous airport ground operations. He is co-supervised by Prof Rakesh Nagi (Head of Engineering Systems and Design, and Director of ASI) and Assistant Prof Ribeiro. Marcus is also a Senior Research Assistant at ASI, and alumni of BEng (ESD) programme (Class of 2020).

Marcus Koh’s (third from left) PhD work is co-supervised by Prof Rakesh Nagi and Assistant Prof Ribeiro.