UPF Department of Economics and Business Professor Jesica de Armas has been awarded a 2017 Luis Azcárraga Prize from the ENAIRE Foundation for her research in efficient air transport planning and organisation. The ENAIRE Foundation Awards were created in 1995 to stimulate dedication to aeronautics and to award annual research prizes to those deserving public recognition.

The awarded paper, titled "A multi-start randomized heuristis for real-life crew rostering problems in airlines with work-balancing goals", describes an algorithm designed to capture realistic constraints, regulations, and industry rules in order to distribute airline crew workloads in fair and unstressful ways. While most modern systems may not take all these factors into account and have steps that must be adjusted by hand, the new algorithm has been tested on real-life crew rostering scenarios and produces optimal results in just a few seconds.

The research was conducted in collaboration with Luis Cadarso Morga (URJC), Angel A. Juan Pérez (UOC), and Francisco Javier Faulín Fajardo (UPNA), who will together share the cash prize of €12,000.

Prof. de Armas recieved her Ph.D in Computer Science from Universidad de La Laguna. Her research focuses on industry combinatorial optimisation problems such as: logistics and transportation planning, scheduling, vehicle routing, heuristics, metaheuristics, machine learning, artificial intelligence techniques, and other operations research.

The Luis Azcárraga Prize recognises works, studies, or projects that constitute a unique contribution to air transport in its manifestations of planning and organisation, economic and administrative management, environmental impact and preservation, and in research and technological innovation. ENAIRE, an entity under the Spanish Ministry of Development, is the national air navigation manager, with two million controlled flights a year, five control centres, and 22 control towers in an air space of more than two million square kilometers.