The Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering at UNIST announced that a group of students under the guidance of Professor Sang Jin Kweon have achieved an outstanding feat by winning the Grand Prize at the ’21st Undergraduate Student Project Competition.’ This recognition highlights their project research results for proposing an effective solution to deliver relief materials quickly and equitably to low-income vulnerable populations.
The team comprised HuiSeong Eom, NaYoung Lee, YuBin Jo, and YeSeong Jung with Professor Kweon and Research Assistant SeokHo Yoon providing unwavering support throughout. The project utilized mathematical optimization models for allocating relief supplies by considering multiple paths serving various purposes to route decision-makers effectively. They derived an optimization solution that balances delivery costs along with inventory management while ensuring fairness using ‘NSGA-II’ (Non-dominant Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II). This algorithm solves multi-purpose optimization problems unlike previous studies.
This accomplishment underscores Professor Kweon’s leadership in driving impactful projects within his department while nurturing future generations towards innovation-driven solutions for real-world challenges. The interdisciplinary focus on urban engineering combined with environmental science has been instrumental in addressing pressing issues affecting society today as seen through this remarkable achievement.
The participating students expressed their satisfaction with approaching and presenting solutions to minimize natural disaster damage, such as earthquakes and climate change from a location routing problem perspective. They added that these findings would serve as the basis for scientific disaster management research for urban areas.
“We embarked on this study with an awareness that various natural disasters disproportionately affect vulnerable populations,” noted the students. “[Thus], we aimed to apply our knowledge acquired through this project towards solving social problems, which resulted in good outcomes.”
Research Assistant Yoon highlighted that “This competition was worthwhile since I could guide the project wholeheartedly thanks to excellent support from Professor Kweon and active participation from my team members.”
This study was possible due to support received under “Ulsan Industry University Convergence District Industry-University Convergence Promotion Support Project.” This initiative has been instrumental in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between academia and industry towards addressing critical challenges affecting society today.
Meanwhile, the competition, hosted by the Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering (KSIE), targets undergraduate university students. It provides a platform for competing with knowledge-related projects and research initiatives across all industrial engineering fields, business administration and related convergence fields via document evaluation and task presentation. The assignment announcement took place at Hanyang University Seoul campus on May 13, 2023.
