Mario Guajardo was recently awarded a diploma in the final of 2020 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for his paper «Scheduling the Main Professional Soccer League of Argentina»
A few days ago, NHH Professor Mario Guajardo was one of five finalists in the highly prestigious Daniel H. Wagner Prize. This is a prize for excellence in the practice of advanced analytics and operations research.
Guajardo is an expert on management science, shipping, transport and logistics and operations research at the Department of Business and Management Science, NHH.
The prize is given by INFORMS, the leading association for operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals. The Daniel H. Wagner Prize is held each year to honor professionals who have shown excellence in operations research practice. Entries to this prestigious award have come from a variety of areas: Health Care, Machine Learning, Logistics, Supply Chain, Political Districting, Manufacturing and Cancer Therapeutics.
Guajardo and his coauthors Guillermo Duran, Facundo Gutiérrez, Javier Marenco (all three from University of Buenos Aires.) and Denis R. Saure and Gonzalo Zamorano (both University of Chile) are very pleased with the nomination and their efforts in the process.
– The road all the way to the final is a long one, as an application goes through a panel of about 10 juries. They have a rigorous process to verify that the works selected for advancement in the competition, first to a semifinal and then to the final, are strong in methodology, but also applied on real-world situations, Professor Guajardo says.
This paper proposes a new methodology to schedule sports tournaments, Guajardo explains:
– It is based on mathematical programming, team clustering and cluster patterns. The methodology has been applied to schedule the main football league of Argentina and our solutions have been used in practice in the last two seasons of the league. The impact of the application materializes in a number of aspects, such as ensuring sporting fairness by alternating the home-away status of each match in consecutive seasons and balancing the teams' travel distances. It has also received large attention from the media in Argentina, with many articles in newspapers and notes on TV, radio, etc, Mario Guajardo says.
This year´s winning team was Saurabh Bansal of The Pennsylvania State University, Genaro J. Gutierrez of The University of Texas at Austin and Mahesh Nagarajan of the University of British Columbia. Their paper: «Distribution Estimation and Efficient Optimization for Portfolio Management in Agribusiness: Analytical Developments and Benefits».