Behind the scenes with the #INFORMS2024 Plenaries: Featuring Koen Peters, World Food Programme

We’re in the countdown to the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting, in Seattle, Washington, October 20-23, when more than 6,000 INFORMS members, students, prospective employers and employees, and academic and industry experts will share the ways O.R. and analytics are fueling Smarter Decisions for a Better World.

Joining me to give a sneak peek of this year’s meeting is Koen Peters, head of optimization for the World Food Programme’s Supply Chain Planning & Optimization branch. For the last decade he has been leading initiatives in the area of optimization and analytics, including tools that are now used to inform the design of food baskets, sourcing strategies, and delivery networks. These user-friendly solutions ensure that WFP can reach as many people in need as possible with available resources, and were awarded with the 2021 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science.

Koen holds a Master of science degree in operations research and management science from Tilburg University, and is pursuing a PhD in humanitarian analytics at Tilburg University’s Zero Hunger Lab.

We signed up for the Franz Edelman Award basically during the peak of Covid. So we’d been going through this transformation journey at WFP of bringing more and more analytics into the way that we manage and design our operations, which was really brought to an explosion during the COVID peak because we had to go from an organization that was 8-9 billion dollars per year to 13-14 billion dollars per year in terms of assistance. So everything was supercharged, the complexity skyrocketed. We really required these analytics to help us really master this complexity.

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