COPA members Ariel Rojas and Juan Betancourt, currently Industrial Engineering Master's students, advised by Daniel Yamín, instructor of the Industrial Engineering Department, won the international 15th AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition for their work "A Robust Network-Oriented Optimization Method for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Planning in Pennsylvania". Initially, thirteen submissions were received from seven countries around the world. After a first round of evaluation, the judging panel, consisting of Xiu Yang (Lehigh University), Tomasso Giovannelli (Lehigh University), and Gabriela Srevidone (AIMMS), selected three finalists. After presenting their work, the winning team was "OptiCoffee" (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), second place was awarded to the team "Vultures" (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands), and third place was awarded to the team "Clean Air Avengers" (University of Bern, Switzerland).

Congratulations to Ariel, Juan, and Daniel for this outstanding international achievement on behalf of our research group!

The AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition is held annually as part of the Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications conference held at Lehigh University. The MOPTA conference seeks to bring together a diverse group of people working in discrete, continuous, and stochastic optimization and related techniques, such as dynamic programming, heuristics, among others (see here, https://coral.ise.lehigh.edu/~mopta/).