2017 Wagner Prize Winner Lehigh with PA Department of Corrections

The Inmate Assignment and Scheduling Problem and its Application in the PA Department of Corrections

The inmate assignment project, in close collaboration with the PA Dept. of Corrections, took five years from start to successful implementation. Our novel Inmate Assignment Decision Support System (IADSS) is designed with the main goal of simultaneously, and system-wide optimally, assigning the inmates to the correctional institutions. IADSS includes a new hierarchical multi-objective MILO model, which accurately describes the inmate assignment problem. This is the first time that OR methodologies have been used to optimize the operations, and built into the routine business practice, of a correctional system, thus it opens a rich and untouched area for the application of OR.