About the ROADEF 2022 challenge
Imagine a fleet of 5,000 trucks and 260,000 items. How to load the items into the trucks in the most efficient way, considering various constraints? ORTEC eagerly embraced the challenge and participated in the ROADEF Truck Loading 2022 competition.
The ROADEF (French Operational Research (OR) and Decision Support Society) Truck Loading Challenge is a competition that invites participants from around the world to showcase their skills and innovations in optimizing complex logistics and transportation scenarios. The data was provided by Renault Group. In total, 51 teams participated divided over 2 categories: juniors (including master students and PhD students), and seniors (including companies and researchers). ORTEC is proud to win third place. We would like to congratulate the winning team, Florian Fontan and Luc Libralesso, who are experienced researchers and former champions of the 2018 challenge.
Balancing transport and inventory costs
The ROADEF challenge presented ORTEC with a 3D load optimization problem that required finding the most efficient way to load items into trucks while considering two crucial factors: transport cost and inventory cost. The objective was to optimize the allocation of items within the limited space of the trucks, maximizing the utilization of resources, and minimizing the overall costs incurred during transportation and inventory management. This complex trade-off demanded innovative algorithms and approaches to handle large-scale datasets effectively.
One year of competition
The ROADEF Challenge started a year ago - July 2022, attracting teams from various domains eager to showcase their optimization capabilities. The competition consists of three rounds:
- Sprint round
The initial round provided teams with the opportunity to submit results for small instances of the problem. - Qualification roun
At the end of January 2023, our algorithms were tested on medium-sized instances. Only 15 out of the original 51 teams qualified for the final phase: we felt excited to be one of them. - Finals
In the final phase, our team competed using large real-size instances. We’re proud to have won third place.
Dedication, diversity, and team spirit: the ingredients to success
For ORTEC, it was the first time participating in the ROADEF challenge. Our team consisted of 11 ORTEC employees from different offices, countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany), and business units. As a result, we had a diverse range of expertise coming together, making it one of the key ingredients for our success.
Work hard play hard
To work on the complex challenge, the team organized two intensive hackathon weeks, one in December before the qualification deadline and another in May before the finals. “The hackathon weeks were truly the highlights of the challenge, as we fostered creativity and a strong team spirit,” says Wouter Merkx, one of ORTEC’s team members. After the hackathons, the team refined and tested their developed solutions, and fine-tuned their algorithms. The competition wasn’t without nerve-racking challenges. “At some point, we encountered last-minute issues. We had to debug and include a bugfix on the very last day” recalls Wouter. Thanks to the team’s dedication, they were able to fix it in time.
After putting in so much hard work, what could be a better way to unwind than by enjoying some pizza and some table soccer?
The full ORTEC team: Wouter Merkx, Ruggiero Seccia, Annelieke Baller, Wouter Kool, Ilya Artsyman, Gesche Dithmer, Jacob Kooijman, Lotte Berghman, Thomas Visser, Morris Breed and Niels van der Laan.
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About the ROADEF challenge
The ROADEF challenge, hosted by the French Operations Research and Decision Support Society (ROADEF) and EURO, is a bi-annual competition for researchers and practitioners in the field of optimization. Visit the official ROADEF website to get to know more about the challenge.
