MSSIP 2010 is sponsored by SAP. Its Jury consisting of J. Artalejo, W. Ben Ameur, H. Braun, E. Gourdin (Chair), M. Labbé, S. Martello, N. Walker conferred the prize at the EURO 2010 Conference taking place in Lisbon (Portugal)

Abstract
We introduce a traffic routing problem over an extended planning horizon that appears in geosynchronous satellite networks. Unlike terrestrial (e.g., fiber optic) networks, routing on a satellite network is not transparent to the customers. As a result, a route change is associated with significant monetary penalties that are usually in the form of discounts (up to 40%) offered by the satellite provider to the customer that is affected. The notion of these re-routing penalties requires the network planners to look at routing decisions over multiple time periods and introduces novel challenges that have not been considered previously in the literature. We develop a branch-and-price-and-cut procedure to solve this problem and describe an algorithm for the associated pricing problem. Our computational work demonstrates that the use of a multi-period optimization procedure as opposed to a myopic period-by-period approach can result in cost reductions up to 13% depending on problem characteristics and network size considered. These cost reductions correspond to potential savings of several hundred million dollars for large satellite providers.

Keywords: integer multi-commodity flows, multi-period traffic routing, network design, satellite network planning, branch-and-price-and-cut, re-routing, reconfiguration

Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize 2009

The winners of the 2009 edition of the MSSIP are:

Lars Kjær Nielsen and Gábor Maróti
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands
for the paper
Disruption Management of Rolling Stock in Passenger Railway Transportation