Master of Transportation students Krishna Kumar Selvam (who works with Professor Carolina Osorio) and Setareh Borjian (who works with Associate Dean Cynthia Barnhart and Professor Patrick Jaillet) were jointly awarded the second-place prize in the recent INFORMS Railway Applications Section Competition. Their proposal for optimizing the operations of a railroad yard was selected from 42 submissions in the annual competition held during the INFORMS conference. “We built a rule-based discrete time simulator to model the operations of the classification yard, and applied simulation-based optimization techniques to optimize the rules on which the yard operated,” said Selvam. INFORMS, the largest worldwide society for professionals in operations research, management science and analytics, held its 2013 meeting Oct. 6 in Minneapolis.