Professor Sigrun Andradottir and Associate Professor Seong-Hee Kim are the recipients of the Naval Research Logistics 2013 Harold W. Kuhn Award. Their manuscript, "Fully Sequential Procedures for Comparing Constrained Systems via Simulation" was selected by a panel of Naval Research Logistics Associate Editors. The Harold W. Kuhn Award is presented annually during INFORMS awards to an exceptional paper published in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) during the previous three years as selected by a committee of the Associate Editors.

The Kuhn Committee had this to say about the prize-winning paper:

Andradottir and Kim (2010) extends ranking and selection (R&S) procedures, which are statistical approaches for choosing the best system from a set of alternative systems, to consider problems with stochastic constraints. This paper is noteworthy for providing the first formulation of the constrained R&S problem. The authors introduce fully-sequential algorithms for finding the best feasible system with a given probability of correct selection in the presence of a single stochastic constraint. The problem consists of two stages: the feasibility check and the selection of the best system. The authors present two alternative procedures, depending on whether the two stages are preformed sequentially or simultaneously. The authors prove that these procedures guarantee that the best feasible system is selected with a given (pre­ specified) probability. These procedures are evaluated and compared using a set of extensive numerical experiments.

Constrained R&S is an important problem class in the simulation-optimization community. The authors have provided a rigorous analytical approach, as well as practical algorithms, for this problem. They have done so in a paper that is very clearly written, well-organized, with a strong practical motivation. This paper's relevance and contribution are demonstrated by the large number of citations the paper has already received from a variety of sources. In fact, Andradottir and Kim (2010) is the most highly cited paper (measured in citations per year) published in Naval Research Logistics during the 2010-2012 time period.

Sigrun Andradottir joined Georgia Tech in 1995 after five years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in decision making under uncertainty, discrete event simulation, applied probability, stochastic optimization, resource flexibility, and agile production and service systems. Andradottir is the only two-time winner of the Harold W. Kuhn prize (2011 and 2013).  She received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Iceland in 1986, an M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1990.

Kim's research interest centers on ranking and selection procedures for stochastic simulation, optimization via simulation, statistical output analysis, quality control, and applications of simulation methods to environmental management. Kim received the INFORMS Simulation Society Outstanding Simulation Publication Award in 2006 and the NSF Career Award in 2007. She received a B.S. in Industrial Management from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and an M.S. & Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University.