Jésica de Armas, Assitant Professor in the Department of Economics and Business of the UPF, has been the winner of the 2017 Luis Azcárraga Prize of the ENAIRE Foundation for her research in planning and efficient organization of air transport. The ENAIRE Foundation awards were created in 1995 to stimulate dedication to aeronautics and award annual research prizes to those who deserve public recognition.

The winning prize, entitled “A multi-start randomized heuristis for real-life crew rostering problems in airlines with work-balancing goals”, describes an algorithm designed to capture realistic restrictions, regulations, and industry standards in order to distribute the burdens of work of the crew of the airline on holidays and lighten routes. While many modern systems do not take into account all these factors and take steps that must be adjusted by hand, the new algorithm has been tested among a list of different crews producing optimal results in a few seconds.

The research has been carried out in collaboration with Luis Cadarso Morga  (URJC), Angel A. Juan Pérez (UOC), and Francisco Javier Faulín Fajardo (UPNA), who will share the prize of 12,000 euros.

Professor de Armas obtained her doctorate in Computer Science from the University of La Laguna. Her research focuses on  combinatorial optimization problems in the industry such as logistics and transport, vehicle route planning, heuristics, metaheuristics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques.

The Luis Azcárraga Prize recognizes works, studies or projects that constitute a unique contribution to air transport and its manifestations of organization and planning, economic and administrative management, environmental impact and conservation, and research and technological innovation. ENAIRE, an entity under the Ministry of Development, is the national air transport company, with two million flights controlled per year, five control centers and 22 control towers in an air space of two million square kilometers.