A School of Mathematical Sciences Professor and his former PhD student have won a medal from a prestigious society.

Professor Andrew Titman and former PhD student Dr Lucy Morgan, alongside their co-authors, have received The Operational Research Society Awards KD Tocher Medal based on research completed in statistical modelling.

The Operational Research Society Awards are highly prestigious, and the KD Tocher Medal is awarded specifically in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of simulation published in the Journal of Simulation within a two-year period.

This award is named in memory of KD Tocher, who made a significant contribution to the field of discrete-event simulation by developing the basis on which much modern software is built via his General Simulation Program. He is the author of “The Art of Simulation” (1963), a formative book in the field.

Professor Titman, Dr Morgan and the wider research team were awarded the medal including the Management School’s Visiting Researcher Dr David Worthington and Visiting Professor Barry Nelson.

The award is based on the research completed from one specific paper, which has been singled out for the medal above all others in the area: A spline function method for modelling and generating a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. The paper creates a new method to aid simulation modelling of queueing systems. Queues arise in many situations including shops, call centres or health care services. However, the pattern of arrivals to a queue, for instance patients arriving at A&E at a specific hospital, is both random and highly dependent on the time of day and day of the week. An important practical problem is deciding the staffing pattern for the queue to avoid the possibility of excessive waiting times. The paper showed that the proposed method can more accurately model past data on queue arrivals and hence give better staffing recommendations to alleviate potential issues.

This paper was based on original research following on from Dr Morgan’s PhD thesis in the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training.

Professor Titman said: “The work gives a good demonstration of the usefulness of collaboration between statistics and operational research. The paper uses penalized splines, which are used quite often in statistical modelling, but had not previously been applied to modelling arrival processes for queueing models. The paper shows they perform better than the existing approaches commonly used for time-dependent arrival processes in the simulation-modelling community. The method has the potential for improving modelling and control of real-life queues - for instance Lucy applied the technique to NHS 111 call data in her PhD thesis.”

Head of the School of Mathematical Sciences, Professor Gordon Blower, said: “We are pleased that Andrew Titman, Lucy Morgan, and David Worthington of Lancaster University, with their collaborator Barry Nelson, have achieved this distinction. Lucy Morgan is a PhD graduate from the EPSRC STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training, which transfers statistical methodology into fruitful application. Their successful paper arose from an innovative use of statistics in simulation theory.”

The team were given their award during the recent OR Society’s Blackett lecture at the Royal Society in London. Dr Morgan is now Analytics Manager focusing on Simulation Modelling in Healthcare settings at The Strategy Unit.