Rajan Batta Receives Koopman Prize

By Elizabeth Egan 

The award is named after Bernard Koopman, a pioneer in military operations research, and recognizes an outstanding publication in military operations research from the previous year.

Batta is recognized for his paper, “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Information Collection Missions with Uncertain Characteristics,” along with his two co-authors Michael Moskal II (PhD ’16, MS ’13, BS’11),and Erdi Dasdemir, an assistant professor at Hacettepe University in Türkiye who came to the University at Buffalo as a visiting scholar in 2022.

“Receiving the Koopman Prize was humbling in a sense, from both the history of Dr. Koopman and the award, while also being named alongside my two decorated colleagues, Rajan Batta and Erdi Dasdemir,” said Moskal. “It also reaffirmed my love for operations research and the importance of the research and industry partnerships at UB.”

The project received funding from the Office of Naval Research and was a partnership between UB and the Data Science and Information Fusion Group at CUBRC, a nonprofit headquartered in Western New York dedicated to technology development and national defense. Their research started over 10 years ago as a novel application of traditional operations research methods that emphasized relevance to real-world unmanned ariel vehicle (UAV) route planning while advancing state-of-the-art optimization methodologies.

The team studied the UAV route planning problem for information collection missions that are performed in terrains with stochastic attributes. They developed a mixed integer programming model that can maximize the expected information collection while limiting the risk of not completing the mission on time, of being detected and restricting the variance imposed on flight duration. Their model allows for multiple path alternatives between target pairs. They validated that the performance of the model’s optimal solution is close to the result reported by the solver through a simulation study and concluded that the model is effective for practical-sized missions with a negligibly small failure rate of its optimal routes in actual missions.

“I am really excited about this work as it combines stochastic modeling and optimization in an innovative manner to address an important information collection problem,” said Batta.

Batta has had a significant impact in the area of urban operations research, the branch of operations research concerned with logistical and planning applications that can impact services such as national security. He has been a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on over $13 million of externally-funded research. Batta also received the 2018 Koopman Prize, on top of other prestigious awards, including the Dr. David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE). He is a fellow of both INFORMS and IISE.

Batta earned his PhD in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.