The Society of Statistics and Operations Research (SEIO), in collaboration with the BBVA Foundation, has awarded the SEIO-BBVA Foundation 2026 Prize for the best applied contribution in Operations Research to the work "Solving a short sea inventory routing problem in the oil industry", signed by Sergio Cavero, Manuel Laguna and Eduardo García Pardo.

Eduardo García Pardo is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering (ETSII) of Rey Juan Carlos University, where he also serves as the academic secretary. He leads the GRAFO research group, which specializes in high-performance algorithms for solving optimization problems. Sergio Cavero, co-author of the paper, is also a professor at ETSII and a member of the same group, where he is completing his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Abraham Duarte and García Pardo himself. The third author, Manuel Laguna, is professor emeritus at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder (United States).

The award-winning article, published in the journal Computers & Industrial Engineering, addresses the problem of scheduling product shipments by ship between production and consumption ports in the oil industry, minimizing distribution costs while respecting inventory limits at each port. The authors combine mixed-integer linear programming with heuristic techniques to solve large-scale instances, achieving significant reductions in operating costs in real-world scenarios.

The award, which includes a prize of 6.000 euros, is part of the seventh edition of the SEIO-BBVA Foundation Awards, which annually recognize outstanding scientific contributions in Statistics, Operations Research, and Data Science made by Spanish universities and research centers. The winner of this edition has been announced by the president of SEIO to the society's members.