Collin Drent awarded Van Zwet Award for best PhD-thesis
Drent won the award with his thesis “Structured Learning and Decision making for Maintenance”.
At the annual meeting of the Vereniging voor Statistiek en Operations Research (VVSOR - Association for Statistics and Operations Research) Collin Drent was awarded the Van Zwet Award for best PhD-thesis. His thesis deals with systems that need maintenance because they can fail. The question now is what is the optimal repair strategy in order to optimize trade-off between down time due to repairs and down time and other costs due to failures. To optimize this, it is imperative to use real-time information of the current state of the system. Collin Drent in his thesis addresses this need by developing elegant and useful mathematical theory for this problem. This theory, as the title of the thesis says, combines learning and decision making.
Jelle Goeman, chair of the Van Zwet award jury 2023 about Drent’s thesis: “There is a lot to like in this thesis: there is mathematical rigor, intuitive explanations, modeling, conceptual innovation, algorithms and extensive numerical studies.”
Collin Drent is happy with receiving this award: “In my PhD research, I combined mathematical techniques from both statistics and operations research, and as this award is for the best PhD thesis in either of those two fields, it truly feels as receiving the highest form of recognition in The Netherlands for our work. I also would like to thank my supervisors Stella Kapodistria, Onno Boxma, and Geert-Jan van Houtum once more, because this award is as much theirs as it is mine.”