A student team working at the Intelligent and Mobile Robotics Group (IMR), Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) repeated its success in 2020 and finished 2nd in the Junior category of the ROADEF Challenge 2022 optimization competition.
The CIIRC team consisted of only two members – David Woller (PhD student led by Miroslav Kulich, IMR CIIRC CTU) and Tomáš Hromada (master student, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU). The team ranked 2nd in the final phase in the category and 9th in the overall ranking.
ROADEF Challenge is organized by the French Operations Research & Decision Support Society (ROADEF). It aims at identifying and solving new optimization problems, which are proposed every two years by an industrial partner – including Google, Renault, or SNCF in the past. In 2022, the competition was held for the thirteenth time.
The 2022 problem was formulated by the French car manufacturer Renault. The goal was to schedule timely delivery of car parts from various suppliers to Renault factories. The problem also addressed 3D loading of delivered items into individual trucks and considered various realistic constraints, such as loading order of items, weight limits of trucks, maximal load on individual truck axles, or prevention of load shifting due to abrupt braking. The largest problem instances considered more than 200000 items of 60000 different classes that had to be delivered by more than 6000 trucks.
In total, 51 international teams participated in the year-and-a-half-long competition, which was split into several elimination phases (qualification, semi-final, and final). There was a separate Junior category for young researchers, defined by not being a PhD graduate.
