Industrial Engineering Students Recognized at International Conference

September 22, 2015

Photo Courtesy of the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering

University of Texas at El Paso industrial engineering students were honored earlier this month at the 2015 International Conference on Operation Excellence and Service Engineering.

For their paper, "Global Warming Potential and Cost Minimization for the Centralized Carrier Collaboration Multi-Hub Location Optimization Problem," Juan Fernandez, Eduardo Castillo, Claudia Valles and Ileana Delgado received the honor of best research article in the conference's sustainable engineering division.

"This experience gave me the necessary tools for my own professional growth," said Delgado. "It provided me with a vision of my strengths and pushed me to continue giving more of myself today to be able to continue reaching achievements like these tomorrow."

UTEP Associate Professors of Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering (IMSE) Jose Espiritu Nolasco, Ph.D., and Heidi Taboada-Jimenez, Ph.D., were present at the conference supporting the IMSE students.

"Having our students attend and present at national and international conferences is an important component in the academic life of a researcher since it's a chance to interact with peers and gain professional experience as well," Taboada said. "Sustainable engineering has been an important research area at the IMSE department for a few years and these awards recognize the fact that we are preparing students who can address real-world challenges, in this case, in the evaluation of environmental impacts in a well-known logistics and transportation problem."

At the same conference, Espiritu and industrial engineering student Eduardo Castillo Fatule won second place in the graduate student paper competition for their work entitled "Centralized Carrier Collaboration and Multi-Hub Location Optimization Using Genetic Algorithms."

The conference was organized by the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Society (IEOM). The society serves as a forum for academics, researchers, and practitioners to share ideas and recent developments in the fields of industrial, service, manufacturing, and systems engineering, operations research, engineering and operations management, as well as operations excellence.

The main theme of this year's conference was "achieving and sustaining excellence in quality, service and operations."