Albert Wagelmans receives the Paul Kleindorfer Award in Sustainability

The paper was published in 2020 in Production and Operations Management (POM) journal, one of the international top journals in the field of Operations Management, as evidenced by the fact that it is a so-called P* journal at the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM).

Albert Wagelmans is delighted with the news: ‘Being awarded the Paul Kleindorfer Award in Sustainability means that our paper has been selected as the best paper published by the Sustainable Operations and the Disaster Management departments of POM Journal during 2018-2021. Harwin, Joris and I are both pleasantly surprised and very honoured.’

How to provide African truck drivers good access to healthcare services

Providing African truck drivers with adequate access to healthcare is an effective way to reduce the burden and the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases. Therefore, NGO North Star Alliance builds a network of healthcare facilities along major African trucking routes. Choosing the locations of new facilities presents novel and complex optimisation problems. In their paper titled ‘The Roadside Healthcare Facility Location Problem A Managerial Network Design Challenge’, researchers Wagelmans, De Vries and Van de Klundert look for a solution to a general design problem: the Roadside Health Care Facility location Problem (RHFLP). RFHLP entails to select locations for new facilities and to choose for each of these facilities whether to add healthcare services for HIV, STIs, Tuberculosis, and/or Malaria to the standard health service package. The objective combines the maximisation of the truck driver patient volume at these facilities and the maximisation of the extent to which the truck drivers have continuous access to the needed health service packages. The researchers present three measures for continuous access to health services by mobile patients and integrate these measures in a mixed-integer programming formulation for RHFLP. Besides deriving various theoretical results, they show that the present network expansion strategy, which primarily focuses on patient volumes, may need to be reconsidered: substantial gains in effectiveness can be made when allowing a small reduction in patient volumes. Furthermore, they show that solutions are rather robust to data impreciseness and that long-term network planning can bring substantial benefits, particularly in greenfield situations.

About the Paul Kleindforfer Award in Sustainability

The Paul Kleindorfer Award in Sustainability was originally established by the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) to recognise young scholars who had distinguished themselves through the breadth and innovativeness of their scholarly work on questions related to sustainable operations and the social and environmental impact of business. Recently, it was changed into an award for the best paper in the same research area, of which Wagelmans and his co-authors are the first recipients.