Samuel Pelletier and Jinglu Jiang win for their dissertation

Supervised by Professors Gilbert Laporte and Ola Jabali, Samuel Pelletier’s dissertation is entitled Goods Distribution With Electric Vehicles. It suggests decision-support tools for the use of electric vehicles for distributing various types of goods, in particular as concerns the purchase, routing and scheduling of recharging for these vehicles.

Published in the world’s top scientific journals in the field of transportation planning, papers based on his dissertation have been cited 295 times, according to Google Scholar. In addition to presenting practical recommendations to support EV fleet managers, his dissertation stands out from other studies on this topic in its original content.

“When I was writing my dissertation, most of the papers in this field offered decision-support tools for slightly different versions of the same problem, i.e. determining optimal routing for an EV goods distribution fleet with vehicles that have to stop at recharging stations en route,” explains Samuel. “We looked at conceptually different, but equally important themes: modelling the battery charging process to take account of their degradation based on use, drawing up schedules for recharging at the depot, developing delivery routes reflecting uncertain energy consumption, and strategic planning for fleet renewal.”

Since November 2019, Samuel has been an Operations Research Scientist with Blaise Transit, a Montréal start-up offering an AI-based software platform that allows transit operators to run on-demand bus services.

Supervised by Associate Professor Ann-Frances Cameron, Jinglu Jiang was rewarded for her dissertation entitled Three Essays on the Role and Impacts of Data-Enabled Process Virtualization.

Her dissertation, divided into three essays, looks at process virtualization in different contexts using a variety of methodologies, with the goal of understanding how elements of virtualized processes can change human interactions and impact individuals, organizations and society.

• The first essay looks at how IT-enabled self-monitoring is used in health care for chronic disease self-management.
• The second shows how human agent and machine agent actions on digital platforms give rise to collective social outcomes.
• The third focuses on virtualized medical service delivery by mining massive consumer behaviour data in the context of online medical consultation.

“With the implementation of digital technologies, we are increasingly virtualizing social processes by removing physical interactions,” says Jinglu Jiang, now an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University, in the United States. “Process virtualization involves converting representations of our body, events, activities, and environment into bits and bytes and delivers such representations in appropriate manners.”

Thanks to their theoretical and practical applications, two of the essays in her dissertation have already been published, one in an A+ journal. The originality of her methodology lies in part in the wide variety of methods used and the combination of different approaches.