Igor Smit wins KHMW Young Talent Graduation Award for Data Science
With his thesis on Learning to Be Efficient and Fair for Collaborative Order Picking
On November 27th, Igor Smit, a former student in the Information Systems research group, won the national KHMW Young Talent Graduation Prize for Data Science. The jury was very impressed with his work. In his thesis, Smit develops a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to efficiently manage workers and robots working together to pick items in a warehouse. The approach models the warehouse as a graph and develops a multiple-objective RL method to continuously assign workers to pick locations in a way that improves efficiency while also making the work evenly distributed between all workers. Igor conducted his thesis at Vanderlande.
Double master track
As a student Igor completed two master tracks simultaneously: Operations Management and Logistics (OML) and Data Science in Engineering (DSiE). His thesis was carried out in TU/e’s Information Systems group under the supervision of Yingqian Zhang and Zaharah Bukhsh and in TU/e’s Data Mining group with Mykola Pechenizkiy. Zaharah Bukhsh congratulates Igor on behalf of all his mentors with his well-deserved award: “We are proud of Igor on this impressive achievement and innovative research that could significantly improve warehouse operations”.
Link to KHMW’s news bulletin (in Dutch)
About the KHWM
The Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen KHMW), the oldest "Learned Society" in the Netherlands, was founded in 1752, with the aim of promoting science, in the broadest sense. The KHMW aims to bridge the gap between science and society, by issuing competitions, awarding scientific achievements and organizing lectures and conferences.