The paper Data-Driven Optimization for Commodity Procurement under Price Uncertainty by Dr. Christian Mandl and Prof. Dr. Stefan Minner won the first prize of the 2019 MSOM Practice-Based Research Competition.

The objectives of the competition are to motivate, help develop, reward and highlight high-quality research papers with significant practical relevance.

After being selected as one of six finalist papers in a two-round review process by the MSOM Academic Competition Committee under the direction of competition chair Jérémie Gallien (London Business School), the finalist papers were presented at the MSOM Conference in Singapore in front of a judge panel composed of high-level practitioners (Desmond Cai, Research Scientist at IBM; Sameer Gupta, Chief Analytics Officer at DBS Bank; and Wanli Min, Chief Data Scientist and Vice President at Alibaba Cloud).

The paper presents data-driven and machine learning-enabled optimization algorithms for commodity purchasing and is motivated by a real-world application from energy purchasing. All finalist papers are forthcoming in the FT50 journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.