Awards

Student Travel Scholarships:

The association annually awarded up to four scholarships of up to NIS 2,500 each to support student travel to international conferences: details.

Life Achievement Award

This prize is designed to recognize ORSIS members who have made significant and continuous contributions to the field of Operations Research over many years. The contributions should have implications for Operations Research in Israel, as expressed through research activities and relevant applications, advancing the profession within the scientific community, establishing the next generation of students and serving the OR community through ORSIS and increasing public awareness.

Past Award Recipients:

• Avishai Mandelbaum - 2024

• Refael Hassin - 2021

• Aharon Ben-Tal – 2017

• Arie Tamir – 2014

• Reuven Rubinstein – 2011

• Benjamin Avi-Itzhak – 2010

• Mordecai Avriel – 2005

• Uri Yechiali – 2004

• Itzhak Ravid – 2003

ORSIS Award on the name of Uriel (Uri) Rothblum

The ORSIS Award in the name of Uriel (Uri) Rothblum was established by his family in 2013 for Excellent Work in Operations Research.

Uri was one of the outstanding scholars in Operations Research in Israel beginning in the early eighties until his untimely death in March 26, 2012. Uri contributed to many areas of Operations Research ranging from dynamic programming through game theory and matching problems to algebra and combinatorial optimization. He published about 150 articles in international journals, as well as two books. Uri was a member of many journal editorial boards and in particular was the editor-in-chief of the leading journal: Mathematics of Operations Research. Uri was the president of ORSIS from 2006 to 2008 and contributed greatly both to the OR society and to the field, ensuring continuation for the next generation. He was a professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion for three decades and served as its dean. He also served for several years as the Technion’s Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs.

As a continuation of his contribution to the field of Operations Research and in order to perpetuate the name of Uriel Rothblum, his family established this fund to encourage excellence in Operations Research.

Past Award Recipients

• 2024 - Ran I. Snitkovsky, "Stochastic approximation of symmetric Nash equilibria in queueing games”
  (joint with Liron Ravner)

• 2023 - Nicole Adler, " Identifying Merger Opportunities: The Case of Air Traffic Control”
  (joint with Ole Bent Olesen, and Nicola Volta) 

• 2022 –  Ella Segev, "The Important Role of Time Limits When Consumers Choose Their Time in Service”
  (joint with Pnina Feldman) 

• 2021 – Liron Ravner,  “Estimating the input of a Lévy-driven queue by Poisson sampling of the workload process”

(joint with Onno Boxma and Michel Mandjes)

• 2020 – Eran Hanany, “Incomplete Information Games with Ambiguity Averse Players”
  (joint with Peter Klibanoff and Sujoy Mukerji)

• 2019 – Shoham Sabach and Yakov Vaisbourd (joint with Jerome Bolte and Marc Teboulle),”First Order Methods Beyond Convexity and Lipschitz Gradient Continuity With Applications To Quadratic Inverse Problem”

• 2018 – Niv Buchbinder and Moarn Fekdman, “Deterministic Algorithms for Submodular Maximization Problems”

• 2017 – Dan Yamin, (joint with Forrest K. Jones, John P. DeVincenzo, Shai Gertler, Oren Kobiler, Jeffrey P. Townsend, and Alison P. Galvan), “Vaccination strategies against respiratory Syncytial virus”

• 2016 – Tamar Cohen and Liron Yedidsion, “The Periodic Joint Replenishment Problem is Strongly NP-Hard”

• 2015 – Amir Beck and Nadav Hallak, “On the Minimization Over Sparse Symmetric Sets: Projections, Optimality Conditions and Algorithms.”

• 2015 –  Yair Shaki and Josh Reed, “A Fair Policy for the G/GI/N Queue with Multiple Server Pools.”

• 2014 – Itai Gurvich, Junfei Huang and Avishai Mandelbaum, “Excursion-Based Universal Approximations for the Erlang-A Queue in Steady-State”.

The Abraham Mehrez Prize

The Abraham Mehrez Prize for Excellent Work of a Graduate Student in Operations Research.
Avraham Mehrez, born in Haifa in 1947, held prominent roles at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, including Vice Rector, Dean of the School of Management, and Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management. He was also active in the Council for Higher Education and served as a senior academic advisor. Known for his prolific research output, Mehrez became a full professor at Ben-Gurion University at the age of 38, among the youngest in the institution's history. His research spanned various fields, from decision-making to economics. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 53, leaving a legacy of scholarly excellence and institutional development. 

Past Award Recipients

2024 - Eyal Cohen, " Alternating and Parallel Proximal Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth, Nonconvex Minimax: A Unified Convergence Analysis ", Authors: Eyal Cohen and Marc Teboulle

2023 - Loay Mualem, "Using Partial Monotonicity in Submodular Maximization", Authors: Loay Mualem and Moran Feldman

2022 – Gal Neria, " The Dynamic Pickup and Allocation with Fairness Problem", Authors: Gal Neria and Michal Tzur 

2021 – Tzvi Alon, Nir Halman, “Automatic generation of FPTASes for stochastic monotone dynamic programs made easier”

2020 – Antonio Castellanos, Galit B. Yom-Tov, Yair Goldberg, “Silent Abandonment in Contact Centers: Estimating Customer Patience from Uncertain Data”

2019 – Ohad Eisenhandler, Michal Tzur, “The Humanitarian Pickup and Distribution Problem”

2018 – Nitzan Carmeli, Galit B. Yom-Tov, Onno J. Boxma, “State-Dependent Estimation of Delay Distributions In Fork-Join Networks”

2017 – Binyamin Oz, “Strategic behavior in queues”, (The thesis was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Haviv)

2016 – Ran I. Snitkovsky, Refael Hassin, “Strategic Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks”

2015 – Liron Ravner, “Equilibrium Arrival Times to a Queue with Order Penalties“.

2014 – Nir Perel, (under the supervision of Prof. Uri Yechiali), “The Israeli Queue, And Polling Systems With Preparation Times”.

2013 – Ricky Roet-Green, Refael Hassin, “Equilibrium In A Two Dimensional Queueing Game: When Inspecting The Queue Is Costly”.

2012 – Assaf Avrahami, Yale T. Herer, Retsef Levi, “The Value of Information in a Retailer-Based Distribution Network”.

2011 – Lyubov Romanchuk , Raymond Hemmecke, Shmuel Onn, (under the supervision of Dr. Guy Even and Prof. Shmuel Onn), “N-fold Integer Programming in Cubic Time“.

2010 – Dan Yamin, (under the supervision of Prof. Arie Gavious), “Self Interest vs. Group Interest in Influenza Virus Vaccination Policy”.

2010 – Alexander Zadorojniy, (under the supervision of Dr. Guy Even and Prof. Adam Shwartz), “A Strongly Polynomial Algorithm for Controlled Queues”.

2009 – Shimrit Maman, (under the supervision of Prof. Avishaishai Mandelbaum and Dr. Sergey Zeltin), “Uncertainty in the Demand for Service:The Case of Call Centers and Emergency Departments”.

2009 – Michal Moatti, (under the supervision of Prof. Prof. Israel David), “A Stylistic New Model for the Problem of Organ Allocation on the Waiting List”.

2008 – Yael Berstein, (under the supervision of Shmuel Onn), “Nonlinear bipartite matching“.

2008 – Yoni Nazarathy, (under the supervision of Prof. Gideon Weiss), “The Asymptotic Variance Rate of the Output Process of Finite Capacity Birth-Death Queues”.

Pinhas Naor Memorial Lecture 

The Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion has established an annual prize in his honor for outstanding students in Operations Research, and the Pinhas Naor Memorial Lecture is given in his honor at the annual conference of the Operations Research Society of Israel.
Pinhas (Paul) Naor, born in Vienna, Austria, moved to Palestine (Israel) in 1939 with Youth Aliyah. Excelling in Mathematics and Physics at the Technion, he earned a Ph.D. in Metallurgy at the University of Birmingham and studied Statistics at the University of Chicago. Joining the Technion's Department of Metallurgy in 1953, he later co-founded the Department of Industrial Engineering.
Naor advocated for interdisciplinary studies, influencing Industrial Engineering departments nationwide. He founded the Operations Research Society of Israel, and became its first President. His seminal work in queuing theory and optimal control of queuing systems left a lasting impact. Tragically, he died in a plane crash in 1970. 

Past Awards

 Oded Levin Prize

The purpose of the prize is to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Oded Levin, who was an active member of the Society, by encouraging scientific work in the field of Operations Research. Dr. Oded Levin fell in the defense of Israel on June 1969, while on active duty in the Golan Heights.
This fund was closed in February 2003.

Past Award Recipients:

• 2002 – Gadi Fibich (with Arieh Gavious and Oded Lowengart), Explicit Solutions for Optimal Strategies in Optimization Models and in Differential Games with Non-smooth (Asymmetric) Reference Effects, Operations Research, Vol. 51, No. 5, pp. 721-734.

• 2000 – Tamar Margalit, (with Aharon Ben-Tal, Arkadi Nemirovski), : “The Ordered Subset Mirror Descent Optimization Method with Application to Tomography”, SIAM J. Optimization, Vol.12, No.1, pp. 79-108.

• 2000 – Hagit Glickman,  “A Best Choice Problem With Multiple Selectors”.

• 1996 – Aharon Melman, “Two Relaxed Nonlinear Knapsack Problems”.

• 1993 – Aharon Melman, “A Transformation Method for the Line-Search Procedure in Interior-Point .Methods for Linear and Convex Quadratically Constrained Programming”.

• 1990 – Israel David, (Three papers)

  1.  (with Uri Yechiali) “Sequential assignment match processes with arrival of candidates and offers”, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences 4 (3), pp. 413–430, 1990.

  2.  (with Uri Yechiali) “One attribute sequential assignment match processes in discrete-time”, Operations Research 43 (3), pp. 879–884, 1995,

  3.  “A sequential assignment match process with general renewal arrival times”, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences 9 (4), pp. 475–492, 1995.

• 1990 – Shoshana Anily, “Milti-Item Replenishment and Storage Problems )Misrsp(: Heuristics and Bounds“

• 1985 – Dov Samet, Yair Tauman and Israel Zang, “An Application of the Aumann-Shapley Prices for Cost Allocation in .Transportation Problems“

• 1985 –  Oded Berman, David Levi Simhi, “Minimum and Minimax Location of a Traveling Salesman”

• 1977 – Reuven Yaakov Rubinstein, (Three papers):

  1. “Using a Monte-Carlo Method for Optimizing Smoothed Functionals”

  2. “Multilevel Adaptive Optimization Algoritms”

  3. “Choice of Optimal Search Strategy”

• 1974 – Meir G. Kohn, Yakir Plessner, “An Applicable Model of Optimal Marketing Policy”.

• 1972 – Victor Klee, George J. Minty, “How Good Is The Simplex Algorithm?”

Yossef Levi Prize

The purpose of the prize is to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Joseph Levy, who was a lecturer in Operations Research in the Department of Business Administration of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A founding member of ORSIS and active in its first Council, Dr. Levy fell in the defense of Israel during the Six Day war during the battle for the liberation of Jerusalem on June 6, 1967. The Joseph Levy prize promotes scientific work in the fields of Operations Research and Managerial Economics.
This fund was closed in February 2003.

Past Award Recipients :

• 2003 – Aharon Ben Tal, Boaz Golany, Arcadi Nemirovski (with Jean Philippe Vial), “Supplier-Retailer Flexible Commitments Contracts: A Robust Optimization Approach“

• 2001 – Avi Mandelbaum (With Sem Borst and Martin I. Reiman), “Dimensioning Large Call Centers“, Operations Research, 52(1), pp. 17-34, 2004.

• 1999 – Ephraim Korach (With Phillip B. Gibbons), “Testing Shared Memories”. See: SIAM Journal on Computing, 26(4), pp. 1208-1244, 1997.

• 1994 – David Assaf and Ester Samuel-Cahn, “The Secretary Problem: Minimizing the Expected Rank with i.i.d. Random Variables”, Advances in Applied Probability
  Vol. 28, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 828-852

• 1991- Moshe Even Haim, “The Physical Design of Circuits Boards: A Mathematical Programming Approach”.

• 1986 – Ilan Adler and Nimrod Megiddo, “A simplex algorithm whose average number of steps is bounded between two quadratic functions of the smaller dimension“.

• 1984 – Dan Tritash

• 1973 – Moshe Asher Pollatschek

ORSIS Prize for Encouraging Excellence in Operations Research

This purpose of this prize is to advance the field of Operations Research in Israel, to encourage researchers, particularly young researchers, and to continue to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Oded Levin and Dr. Joseph Levy, members of the Operations Research Society of Israel, who fell in the defense of Israel.
This fund was closed at the beginning of 2013.

Past Award Recipients :

• 2013 – Yoel Drori and Marc Teboulle, “Performance of First-order Methods for Smooth Convex Minimization a Novel Approach“.

• 2012 – Niv Buchbinder, Joseph (Seffi) Naor, “Online Primal-Dual Algorithms for Covering and Packing“.

• 2011 – Eran Hanany, Yigal Gerchak, “Nash Bargaining Over Allocations in Inventory Pooling Contracts”

• 2010 – Doron Alper, zilla Sinuany-Stern, “Evaluating Israeli Police Stations’ Performance Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)”

• 2009 – Avishai Mandelbaum, Sergey Zeltyn, “Staffing many-server queues with impatient customers: Constraint satisfaction in call centers”

• 2008 – Nir Halman, Diego Klabjan, Chung-Lun Li, James Orlin, David Simchi-Levi, “Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes for Stochastic Dynamic Programs“.

• 2008 – Dror Rawitz, Reuven Bar-Yehuda, “On the Equivalence Between the Primal-Dual Schema and the Local Ratio Technique“.

• 2007 – Dvir Shabtay , Moshe Kaspi, George Steiner, “The no-wait two-machine flow shop scheduling problem with convex resource-dependent processing times”.

• 2006 – Amir Beck, Marc Teboulle, “A Linearly Convergent Dual-Based Gradient Projection Algorithm for Quadratically Constrained Convex Minimization“.

• 2006 – Leah Epstein, Rob van Stee, “Optimal Online Algorithms for Multidimensional Packing Problems“.

• 2005 – Shmuel Onn, Uri Rothblum, “Convex Combinatorial Optimization“.

• 2004 – Asaf Levin, Rephael Hassin, “A Better-Than-Greedy Approximation Algorithm for the Minimum Set Cover Problem“.