Arcelor Mittal loves Project Management

Arcelor Mittal loves Project Management

The students Bert Aelter en Jules Branswyck have received the ArcelorMittal prize for the best thesis during the graduation ceremony for the Business Engineering students (Handelsingenieurs) on 27/09/2014. The thesis was supervised by Mario Vanhoucke and Len Vandenheede, members of the OR&S group at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration from the Ghent University. The award was given by Mr. Erik Roelandts from Arcelor Mittal.

Congratulations to Jules and Bert, and thank you to Erik from Arcelor Mittal!

The picture below is not very clear, but you should see, from left to right: Jules Branswyck, Erik Roelandts and Bert Aelter

In their thesis “Het introduceren van teamrotatie in een projectomgeving”, the students have investigated a combination of a traditional project scheduling problem and a team composition problem. Both problems have been studied extensively in the literature, but a combined approach has not been proposed yet. The focus on the scheduling part lies on minimizing the time and cost of the project, taking into account very case-specific resource constraints into account. More precisely, the optimizer calculates the so-called social cohesion between resources (people), and tries to build teams that consist of people with similar needs and/or preferences. They have used scatter search and genetic algorithm techniques to solve the problem. Currently, we are working hard on writing an academic paper that will soon be submitted to an international journal. Congratulations to our two students!

It's not the first time that Arcelor Mittal recognizes the importance of Operations Research and Project Management. In previous editions, they have awarded our master thesis students for similar topics, as can be seen in the list below:

  • 21/09/2013: Pieter Beeckman and Kenny Vanleeuwen: “An accuracy study and improvement of a time-dependent EV model using Monte Carlo simulation”
  • 22/09/2012: Louis-Philippe Kerkhove: “A study of exact and meta-heuristic planning techniques for unrelated parallel machines with common servers in the textile industry”
  • 07/07/2011: Len Vandenheede, “A case study for multi-project planning”
  • 15/07/2010: Frederic Steen: "Applying the shifting bottleneck procedure for a real-life production problem”
  • 07/07/2007: Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens, “Personnel scheduling in the airline sector: Case Brussels Airlines”