Akcay and Martagan received 2025 EURO Award
MIE Associate Professors Alp Akcay and Tugce Martagan were awarded the 2025 EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper. This award recognizes the most outstanding paper published in the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), one of the leading journals in the field of operations research and decision sciences.
Their paper, titled “A Matheuristic for AGV Scheduling with Battery Constraints,” was selected from a highly competitive pool of 1,044 papers published in the journal in 2022 and 2023 calendar years. This recognition represents a remarkable achievement that highlights their contributions to the field of operations research.
The award-winning research introduced a novel algorithm for scheduling a fleet of heterogeneous Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), explicitly incorporating battery charging decisions within a manufacturing environment. The result was a highly effective solution that delivered an average 33% improvement over the existing dispatching policies commonly used in industry, demonstrating both theoretical rigor and practical impact on manufacturing intralogistics.
“This work exemplifies how rigorous optimization methods can directly impact real-world manufacturing systems,” said Akcay. “By designing solutions grounded in both theory and industrial needs, we were able to develop an approach that’s not only academically novel but also operationally implementable,” added Martagan. The award was presented by the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) during the 34th European Conference on Operational Research, held in Leeds, United Kingdom.