The Aon Spain Foundation and its Disaster Observatory have awarded the award de knowledge dissemination Científica José María Sarriegi for the best article academic research on disaster-related topics to article Bi-objective multilayer location-allocation model for the immediate aftermath of sudden-onset disasters (model bi-goal de asignación de localizaciones multilayer para las consecuencias inmediatas de desastres repentinos), published in 2019 in the journal Transportation Research Part E - Logistics and Transportation Review. 

This award seeks to honor the report of the former Deputy Director researcher of Tecnun, the Guipuzcoan José María Sarriegi, who died in December 2018 as a result of a sports accident. Sarriegi, a professor and PhD in industrial engineering from Tecnun, was Deputy Director of Research at the School of Engineering of the University of Navarra since 2016.

He was researcher principal in European, national and regional projects and during 24 years his teaching work extended to fields such as computer science, information systems, modeling and simulation, management of knowledge and development of projects. He was supervisor of more than 350 final projects Degree, master and career projects. The last of them, within the Chair of Catastrophes of the Aon Foundation and together with Professor Leire Labaka, was the doctoral dissertation of Patricia Maraña, on the resilience of cities in crisis situations, in which she analyzed the systems of public-private collaboration in five cities around the world to prevent and respond to catastrophic situations. 

Sarriegi's academic career came to an end precisely when the Aon Foundation's Chair on Catastrophes was being launched, an important qualitative and quantitative step towards structuring and systematically developing the research and study of catastrophes, including them in the areas of study of engineering degrees. Sarriegi contributed large doses of enthusiasm, knowledge and hard work to outline the contents of the Chair, always with a strategic vision and aware of the demands involved in its creation, the first of its kind in Europe. 

This award that bears his name represents very well the professional and personal values that Sarriegi treasured. This year, the award went to a article written by researchers from the Universities of Agder (Norway), Delft (The Netherlands) and Toulouse (France), which proposes a model to improve the location of distribution centers in order to optimize the response to sudden disasters, to get the financial aid to the affected areas in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost. The aim is to facilitate decision making by exploring trade-offs between response times and logistics costs using operational research methods. 

The Jury of the award, composed of representatives of the Observatorio de Catástrofes, Tecnun and the Chair de Catástrofes de la Fundación Aon España, after analyzing the applications presented, has valued very positively the contribution of this research, as well as the methodology used and the clarity in the exhibition of the results. Likewise, the prestige of the journal in which the article has been published has been taken into account, since Transportation Research Part E - Logistics and Transportation Review has an impact index of 4.690 and is indexed in the first quartile of the JCR index(Journal of Citation Report).

The President of the Aon Foundation's Disaster Observatory, Pedro Tomey, highlighted the international character that this second edition of award is taking on, as papers have been received from several countries: the United States, Israel, Pakistan, Norway and Spain. "At the Aon Foundation and our Observatory we are very pleased with this award, which stimulates and strengthens advances in disaster research and contributes to building resilience in our society."