19 October 2026, by Julia Bachale

Photo: Brüssau/UHH

Hasini Balasuriya, Rachel Black and Kelly Gorman (from left to right)

Three students from this year’s IRES research program at UHH's Institute of Information Systems won first prize in the Undergraduate Student Paper Competition—sponsored by Siemens—at the 3rd IEOM World Congress on Advanced Manufacturing. With their paper titled “Prediction-Informed Yard Planning: A Case Study of a German Container Terminal," Kelly Gorman, Rachel Black, and Hasini Balasuriya presented an analysis of the impact of container dwell time predictions on yard planning at the Port of Hamburg. The specific goal was to predict container dwell times at a container terminal using machine learning models and to apply the results to yard layout planning. A simulation was used to demonstrate how this approach can be implemented in practice. This work was developed during their stay at our institute in June and July 2026. The paper’s advisors and co-authors are Kai Brüssau and Robert Stahlbock from IWI.