Last-Mile Routing Research Challenge Awards Honor $175,000 to Three Winning Groups

Routing is among the most investigated matters in an operations research study; even tiny enhancements in routing efficiency can save companies money and cause energy savings and lowered ecological impacts. Currently, three groups of scientists from universities worldwide have obtained cash prizes amounting to $175,000 for their ingenious route optimization models.

The three groups were the champions of the Amazon Last-Mile Routing Research Challenge, through which the MIT Facility for Transport & Logistics (MIT CTL) and also Amazon interacted with a worldwide area of researchers throughout an array of disciplines, from computer science to business operations to provide supply chain monitoring, testing them to build data-driven route optimization designs leveraging substantial historic route execution data.

First revealed in February, the research difficulty attracted over 2,000 individuals worldwide. Two hundred twenty-nine scientist teams formed throughout the springtime to separately establish services that included driver knowledge into course optimization versions with the intent that they would undoubtedly outperform typical optimization strategies. Out of the 48 groups whose performances were approved for the final round of the challenge, three teams’ work stood out from the rest. Amazon supplied actual functional training data for the performances and assessed entries with technical assistance from MIT CTL scientists.

In reality, motorists often wander from planned and mathematically optimized course series. Drivers carry info about which roadways are tricky to navigate when website traffic is heavy, when and where they can quickly locate parking spots, which stops can be easily used, and several other factors that existing optimization designs do not capture.

Each model addressed the obstacle data in a particular way. The methodological approaches are chosen by the participants frequently combined traditional exact and heuristic optimization to come close to nontraditional machine learning strategies. On the machine learning side, one of the most typically adopted techniques were various versions of artificial neural networks, in addition to inverse reinforcement learning approaches.

Forty-five entries reached the finalist stage, with team members from 29 nations. Participants covered all levels of higher education, from final-year undergraduate students to retired faculty. Entries were analyzed in a double-blind review process to ensure that the judges did not know what team was connected to each entrance.

The third-place reward of $25,000 was granted to Okan Arslan and Rasit Abay. Okan is a professor at HEC Montréal, and also Rasit is a doctoral student at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The runner-up reward at $50,000 was granted to MIT’s own Xiaotong Guo, Qingyi Wang, and Baichuan Mo, all Ph.D. students. The leading reward of $100,000 was granted to Professor William Cook of the University of Waterloo in Canada, Teacher Stephan Held of the University of Bonn in Germany, and Professor Emeritus Keld Helsgaun of Roskilde University in Denmark.

Amazon might interview the top-performing groups for research study duties in the firm’s Last Mile organization. MIT CTL will release and promote brief technical papers created by all finalists and may invite top-performing teams to present at MIT. Further, a team led by Matthias Winkenbach, the MIT Megacity Logistics Laboratory director, will certainly guest-edit a unique issue of Transportation Science, one of the most popular academic journals in this field, including educational documents on topics related to the issue taken on by the study challenge.

Originally published on News.mit.edu. Read the original article.