Each year, Naval Research Logistics awards the Kuhn Prize, an award meant to recognize and reward outstanding research published in the journal over the past three years. Please join us in congratulating the 2020 Kuhn Award Winners:

Bernard G. Zweers, Sandjai Bhulai and Rob D. van der Mei

“Optimizing barge utilization in hinterland container transportation”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nav.21837

The problem considered in this paper is of prime importance in multi-modal transportation. It deals with the optimization of barge utilization between a container port and the hinterland. The relevance of the problem is particularly significant in countries like the Netherlands, where barges must be used to transport containers inland. If only trucks were used to transport containers, one would see a continuous line of trucks between the port of Rotterdam and the German border, for example. Barges also produce little polluting emissions and are therefore environment friendly. The authors model the problem of optimizing barge utilization as an integer linear program, which is then solved by means of a heuristic that exploits theoretical properties. The heuristic yields excellent results: it provides 20% savings with respect to the current situation, and it also yields optimal or near-optimal results on a set of test instances.

Awi Federgruen, C. Daniel Guetta and Garud Iyengar

“Two‐echelon distribution systems with random demands and storage constraints”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nav.21825

The paper studies a classical problem with a new twist. The Lagrangian relaxation approach was novelly adopted to generate lower bounds via the solution of a single-dimensional dynamic program. The comprehensive numerical studies show that the constructed heuristic policy performs extremely well.

Previous winners can be found here.