PhD Award 2026
Congratulations to 2 laureats :
- Luca Brunod Indrigo - "Anchor robustness in project scheduling"
Luca Brunod Indrigo completed his PhD under the supervision of Pascale Bendotti, Philippe Chrétienne, and Bruno Escoffier at Sorbonne University and EDF.
The thesis falls within the field of project scheduling under uncertainty and studies the design of solutions that remain coherent across the different stages of decision-making. It focuses in particular on two complementary directions: robust scheduling, through the notion of robust anchoring, and resource leveling, for which it establishes numerous complexity and approximation results. Robust anchoring aims to ensure that certain decisions made in advance remain stable in the face of uncertainty, notably when task durations or resource availability are uncertain. Resource leveling, in turn, penalizes resource use above a given level and seeks to optimize the use of resources over time by limiting fluctuations or overloads.
The thesis makes theoretical and methodological contributions along both directions. It establishes complexity results, identifying in particular polynomial and NP-hard cases, and proposes exact and approximation algorithms for various models. It also develops advanced solution methods based on mathematical programming, such as column generation and branch-and-price approaches, supported by structural analyses of the underlying problems. These contributions help to better characterize the tractability limits of these problems and to design efficient methods for solving them, with applications motivated by industrial contexts, some of which have led to developments used at EDF.
- Romain Cosson- "Algorithms for Collective Exploration and Decision-Making"
Romain Cosson completed his PhD under the supervision of Laurent Massoulié at the École Normale Supérieure - ENS/PSL.
The thesis focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms for sequential decision-making, where decisions are based on information that is revealed progressively. It addresses uncertain and dynamic environments in which several agents must coordinate in order to explore unknown structures or perform tasks with limited information. A central problem is collective tree exploration, which models the question of how to parallelize the exploration of an unknown environment. The work lies at the interface between theoretical computer science and operations research, and studies several classical models, including ultrametric traversal, metrical task systems, and the k-server problem.
The thesis proposes new algorithms, improves performance guarantees, and establishes new lower bounds. It highlights connections between different frameworks in online algorithms, thereby opening up new research directions. An important theme concerns the role of randomization: the thesis studies barely random algorithms, showing how effective strategies can be implemented with a reduced number of random bits. Finally, it addresses various aspects of the complexity of online algorithms, such as average-case analysis, communication complexity, and computational complexity.
PhD AWARD 2026
The Gaspard Monge Program for Optimization, Operations Research and their Interactions with Data Science, with the participation and scientific patronage of ROADEF and SMAI (MODE group), is launching a call for applications for two thesis prizes (1000€ each).
- Criteria: PhD theses, defended in France in 2025, making significant contributions in the field of optimization and operations research. These contributions can be theoretical or applicative and can be related to mathematics or computer science.
- Awards ceremony and presentation of the winners' work at the next PGMODAYS conference (November 17&18, 2026)
Submissions should be uploaded to the easychair website: closed
Closing date of the call: 22 May 2026
- Additional information :
Documents to be provided: thesis manuscript, abstract of the thesis in English, pre-defense and defense reports, CV with list of publications. Optionally, any letter of support can be added to the file, or sent to Magali Le Chaponnier <magali.lechaponnier@fondation-hadamard.fr> who will communicate it to the jury.
The jury for the 2026 edition is chaired by Welington De Oliveira.
Members appointed by the PGMO Scientific Council
Emilie Kaufman - CNRS CRISTAL Lille
Charles Bertucci - CEREMADE Paris
Xavier Venel - LUISS Guido Carli Rome
Members appointed by the ROADEF
Bernard Penz - GSCOP Grenoble
Axel Parmentier - CERMICS Marne La Vallée
Sandra U. Ngueveu - LAAS Toulouse
Members appointed by the group MODE of SMAI
Emilie Chouzenoux - INRIA Saclay
Adrien Taylor - INRIA Paris
Welington de Oliveira - CMA, Mines Paris - PSL