The Kingsman Prize was established in memory of Professor Brian Kingsman, a long-standing scholar of Management Science. The 2024 prize has been jointly awarded to Management Science and STOR-i PhD graduates Joshua Liu and Hamish Thorburn. After 20 years, this is the final Kingsman prize to be awarded.

Joshua’s PhD supervisors, Ivan Svetunkov and Adam Letchford, wrote the following citation:

“We were delighted to nominate Joshua for the Kingsman Prize. Right from the start, he demonstrated that he was a gifted researcher, mathematician, teacher and computer programmer.

"His thesis shows a mastery of several different research areas, including optimisation, forecasting and behavioural OR. So far, his PhD research has led to two publications in the European Journal of Operational Research, and he has additional papers in the pipeline. On a more personal note, we found Joshua a pleasure to work with, and we very much hope to keep in touch in future.”

Hamish’s supervisor, Anna-Lena Sachs has written the following citation:

"Hamish Thorburn was awarded the Kingsman Prize for his contributions on the staffing problem in sequential sorting facilities during his PhD. He considered mail sorting centres as practical applications, where 100,000s of letters and parcels are sorted each day. Each centre receives dozens of different streams of mail each day, each of which must pass through a network of different work areas to be sorted, before being dispatched to local sorting offices. The staffing problem requires determining the staffing levels of each work area over the course of a day. The problem is difficult not only because it is large-scale - determining levels of staff over dozens of work areas in 10-minute intervals over the course of the day - but also because it is subject to many detailed logistical constraints, and it has multiple conflicting objectives, such as staffing costs versus the amount of mail sorted. In addition, the volumes of the different mail streams may not be known exactly and subject to some randomness.

"Hamish’s first major contribution was the development of a detailed deterministic optimisation model which determined staffing levels and which was published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society in 2023. Hamish next considered how this model could be generalised to deal with the uncertainty in the incoming mail volumes. For this, he developed a stochastic programming formulation of the problem, and this constituted a second chapter of his thesis.

"Hamish not only made research contributions in modelling complex decision problems, but also made more general methodological contributions. This followed on from the second piece of research, and concerned the question of how one represents uncertainty in complex decision problems like that of staffing for a mail centre. This is the so-called problem of scenario generation, and is a key issue in the wider area of stochastic programming. In this area, Hamish developed flexible framework for scenario generation, which incorporated generalised several existing approaches, and demonstrated its effectiveness on a range of problems (including that of the mail centre)."

Papers

Thorburn, H., Sachs, A-L., Fairbrother, J. and Boylan, J.E. A time-expanded network design model for staff allocation in mail centres. (2023). Journal of the Operational Research Society.