An Illinois Center for Transportation research team earned second place in the poster competition at the 2026 INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society Conference, held July 26-29 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yuhui Zhai, Shiyu Shen and Yanfeng Ouyang received the recognition for their poster, “Expected Optimal Distances of Random Bipartite Matching in D-Dimensional Spaces.” Zhai, a doctoral student, presented the team’s work on behalf of Shen, a former doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher, and Ouyang, CEE at Illinois George Krambles Endowed Professor.
Supported in part by the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation, the research examines a mathematical problem called random bipartite matching. The researchers developed formulas for determining efficient ways to pair randomly distributed supply-and-demand points.
One potential transportation application is ride-hailing. The findings can help inform decisions about fleet size and how passengers are matched with nearby drivers, potentially reducing passenger wait times as well as the time and fuel drivers spend traveling to pick up passengers.
The mathematical findings also can be applied beyond transportation to problems involving chemical bonding, gene matching, job selection and social networks.
The conference brought together researchers working across transportation science and logistics, including air transportation, freight movement, intelligent transportation systems, facility logistics, and urban transportation planning and modeling. Presentations explored methods such as optimization, stochastic modeling, network science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Held every three years, the INFORMS TSL Conference provides researchers with an opportunity to present state-of-the-art work, exchange ideas and build collaborations that address transportation and logistics challenges.
The award will be presented to the team during the TSL Business Meeting at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Conference in San Francisco in November.