Gilbert Laporte Receives Goodeve Medal
January 17, 2023
Gilbert Laporte, professor emeritus at HEC Montréal, is one of the recipients of the 2022 Goodeve Medal, which was awarded on December 7 by The Operational Research Society in London.
The medal is awarded annually to authors who have published the best scientific article in the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS). This distinction is conferred in recognition of their outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory, or practice of operational research. Honours were also bestowed upon Giuseppe Bruno, Manuel Cavola, Antonio Diglio and Carmela Piccolo from the University of Naples Federico II, who co-authored the article in question.
In their paper entitled “Reorganizing postal collection operations in urban areas as a result of declining mail volumes – A case study in Bologna”, Gilbert Laporte and his colleagues studied the impact of technological developments on the structure of Italian postal services. This case study highlights the importance of performance optimization and proposes a mathematical programming model that identifies the collection areas to be prioritized in order to reduce the number of postboxes without compromising optimal user accessibility. The proposed solutions also help evaluate the impact of such a reorganization on management costs and facilitate the decision-making process.
The methodology developed through this research can be applied to a wide range of essential services that are in serious need of operational improvement.
about gilbert laporte
Gilbert Laporte obtained a PhD in Operational Research from the London School of Economics in 1975. A Professor Emeritus at HEC Montréal, he taught at the Department of Decision Sciences for 44 years and held the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management from 2001 to 2020.
As a researcher, he is a member of the Group for Research on Decision Analysis (GERAD) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). He is also a Professor at The University of Bath School of Management, United Kingdom and Professor II at Molde University College, Norway. During his career, he wrote or co-authored over 20 books and 600 scholarly articles, and was awarded 3 honorary doctorates from the University of Liège, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.