This year’s finalists apply advanced analytics to tackle critical challenges in sustainability, supply chains and technology.
BALTIMORE, Jan. 21, 2026—INFORMS, the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research (O.R.), AI, analytics and data science, has announced six finalists for the 2026 Franz Edelman Award. Often referred to as “The Nobel Prize” of O.R. and advanced analytics, the Edelman Award recognizes organizations that have achieved demonstrable improvements in performance, efficiency and societal outcomes.
For more than four decades, Edelman finalists and winners have helped reshape how organizations address complex problems. This year’s finalists continue that legacy with advances in supply-chain replenishment, food distribution, cloud fulfillment and carbon-aware high-performance computing.
Since 1972, Edelman finalist and winner projects have generated more than $431 billion in documented value, along with significant improvements in health, safety and decision quality across industries.
The finalists for the 2026 Edelman Award:
Chewy – The largest online pet retailer and pharmacy in the U.S., Chewy transformed replenishment with a science-driven suite of models at scale. Supported by a custom engineering platform and continuous analytics monitoring, the system corrects unreliable data, accounts for supply uncertainty and honors vendor constraints to optimize purchase orders, safety stock, inventory placement and other replenishment decisions. Verified through causal analysis, the solution improved inventory placement, reduced split shipments and shortened shipping distances. In a thin-margin industry, these gains delivered meaningful financial impact and enhanced customer experience.
Department of Food and Public Distribution (DFPD), India – DFPD, in partnership with the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) in India and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, introduced Anna Chakra, an O.R.-based decision support solution, to strengthen India’s Public Distribution System by optimizing state-specific logistics. Its nationwide implementation led to an estimated savings of 2.5 billion Indian rupees (INR) annually and 35% reduction in emissions, contributing to India’s sustainability commitments. Moreover, its deployment and resultant capacity building have fostered efficient planning, expedited delivery and scalable, data-driven improvements, thereby benefiting more than 810 million people, including vulnerable populations. This first-ever nationwide implementation of O.R. in the public sector has created a template framework for a sustainable data-driven decision-making approach that can be scaled up across other departments in India and is ripe for global expansion.
ECCO Shoes – To solve costly, inconsistent manual ordering for retail store replenishment across its vertically integrated global supply chain, ECCO Data & AI developed the Intelligent Auto Replenishment (IAR) solution. A large-scale stochastic mixed-integer program (MIP) optimized replenishment orders for 536 stores in 27 countries in 2025 with a novel “divide and conquer” method. The system automates nearly 300,000 replenishment orders monthly, unifies global inventory management strategy and has reduced key operational costs by 1.09%, translating to several million euros (EUR) in annual savings.
Google – A first-of-its-kind system shifts flexible compute workload in time and across locations to reduce both data center carbon footprint and power infrastructure costs. Designed and deployed by a cross-functional team, the system relies on load forecasting, compute-to-energy modeling, and various linear and discrete optimization methods to ensure effective and robust carbon-aware compute management. Since 2020, the shifting to times and places with low-carbon power resources (like wind and solar) has been active in all data centers across the world, positioning Google as an industry leader in carbon-aware computing.
Microsoft – Microsoft transformed Cloud Supply Chain with the Intelligent Fulfillment Service (IFS), a breakthrough platform that combines machine learning, mathematical optimization, and generative and agentic AI. By automating global shipment planning, IFS cuts cycle times in half and delivers tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings while helping mitigate tariff exposure. Its large-language model (LLM)-powered assistant, built on the pioneering OptiGuide framework, brings real-time explainability and scenario exploration to planners, reducing fulfillment team workload by 23% and compressing decision cycles from days to minutes.
Nvidia – Formed in 1993 to tackle high performance computing with an initial focus on 3D graphics, Nvidia later expanded into a full stack accelerated computing platform. Nvidia’s platforms have enabled a new generation of computational intelligence from modern artificial intelligence to mathematical optimization. As a firm’s products and services advance, the size and complexity of its demand–supply network (DSN) often expand faster than the capabilities of the original supply chain management (SCM) application suite at the firm. This gap creates a need for “smarter” SCM solutions to avoid instability and loss of responsiveness. Nvidia addressed this challenge by leveraging its own high-performance computing platform to create a powerful synergy between artificial intelligence and operations research, with cuOpt serving as the core optimization engine. The resulting application suite enabled Nvidia to drive stability and responsiveness and has become a critical component of its overall performance.
About the Franz Edelman Award
First awarded in 1972, the prize is named in honor of Franz Edelman, who founded the Operations Research division within RCA, one of the first corporations to embed operations research as a business imperative. Previous winners of the Franz Edelman Award include USA Cycling (2025), Molslinjen (2024), Walmart Global Tech (2023) and the Government of Chile (2022), as well as the U.N. World Food Programme, Intel, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Holiday Retirement, UPS, IBM, Syngenta, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Hewlett-Packard and General Motors, among others. The 2026 Edelman Award will be presented at the INFORMS Analytics+ Conference in National Harbor, Md., April 12-14, 2026. Visit here for more information on the Franz Edelman Award.
About INFORMS
INFORMS is the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, AI, analytics, data science and related disciplines, serving as a global authority in advancing cutting-edge practices and fostering an interdisciplinary community of innovation. With a network of more than 12,000 members spanning academia, industry and government, INFORMS connects thought leaders, experts and emerging professionals who advance and apply AI, mathematics, analytics and other sciences and technologies to solve complex challenges and drive impactful decision-making.
Through its prestigious peer-reviewed journals, world-class conferences, industry-leading certification programs and a suite of professional resources, INFORMS empowers its community to enhance operational efficiency, elevate organizational performance and promote smarter decisions for a better world. Discover more at www.informs.org.
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