A team from INESC TEC’s Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI) is a finalist of the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Operations Research, organised by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in the United States, together with other international researchers and companies, including Ford Motor Company, in partnership with University of Michigan, the French postal services La Poste, in conjunction with the MIT and WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management, and CSX Transportation, in partnership with the University of Illinois.

The team, composed of researchers Teresa Bianchi de Aguiar, Elsa Silva, Luís Guimarães, Maria Antónia Carravilla and José Fernando Oliveira, reached the finals with a project with Sonae MC where the team developed the GAP, a tool that makes it possible to define the position of items on supermarket shelves. The tool is used daily by the team that manages spaces at Sonae since 2014, allowing them to generate planograms in an automatic and optimised way, benefiting from the optimisation methods implemented. Simultaneously, the GAP makes the process of defining allocation rules and the consequent customisation of planograms more flexible.

The project was developed by the CEGI researchers mentioned above, together with a team from Sonae MC, led by the Director of Spaces at Sonae, Jorge Liz.

The goal of the Wagner Prize is to award work of excellence in the area of operational research with a practical application, and a strong analytical component. Because they have reached the final, the team competing with the paper “Using Analytics to Enhance Shelf Space Management in a Food Retailer” will have their work published in the journal Interfaces. The results will be announced on 2 November at the annual meeting of INFORMS, in Philadelphia, United States.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC TEC, UP-FEUP.

INESC TEC, September 2015