Dear All,
One of the goals of the INFORMS AI initiative has been to promote greater collaboration between the AI and the OR communities. In support of that, I am excited to share information about the following competition which should be of interest to researchers from both the Operations Research and Machine Learning communities. Please share the following announcement with members of your network including graduate students. It would be great for INFORMS members to participate in this competition in collaboration with colleagues in AI and Machine Learning, if possible. For more information about the problem instances, please visit the EAISI website: https://www.tue.nl/en/news-and-events/news-overview/29-06-2022-euro-meets-neurips-2022-vehicle-routing-competition/
Dr. Radhika Kulkarni
2022 INFORMS President
Call for Participation: EURO Meets NeurIPS 2022 Vehicle Routing Competition
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https://euro-neurips-vrp-2022.challenges.ortec.com/,
We are excited to announce the EURO Meets NeurIPS 2022 Vehicle Routing Competition! This competition brings together researchers from operations research (OR) and machine learning (ML) to address the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) as well as a dynamic VRPTW. Please join us in solving these two challenging VRPTW variants!
Important dates:
- July 1: Start of competition
- October 31: Submission deadline
- November 1st - November 20th: top 10 participants will automatically be tested on new instances
- Between November 28 and December 9: virtual event at NeurIPS with poster session + announcement of final
Overview:
Solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) is an essential task for many industrial applications. While VRPs have been traditionally studied in the OR domain, they have lately been the subject of extensive work in the ML community. This competition is a joint effort of several previous competitions, that brings together the OR and ML communities to solve a challenging VRP variant on real-world data. The challenge focuses on both a 'classic' deterministic VRP with time windows (VRPTW) and a dynamic version in which new orders arrive over the course of a day. As a baseline, we provide a state-of-the-art VRPTW solver and a strategy to use it to solve the dynamic variant, thus ensuring that all competition participants have the tools necessary to solve both versions of the problem.
For more information, see https://euro-neurips-vrp-2022.challenges.ortec.com/
Organizers:
- Wouter Kool (ORTEC)
- Laurens Bliek (Eindhoven University of Technology)
- Danilo Numeroso (Università di Pisa)
- Robbert Reijnen (Eindhoven University of Technology)
- Reza Refaei Afshar (Eindhoven University of Technology)
- Yingqian Zhang (Eindhoven University of Technology)
- Tom Catshoek (Delft University of Technology)
- Kevin Tierney (Bielefeld University)
- Eduardo Uchoa (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
- Thibaut Vidal (Polytechnique Montréal)
- Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC)
This competition is a joint effort of three previous competitions: the 12th DIMACS Implementation Challenge, the series of VeRoLog competitions, and the AI4TSP competition. It is hosted at the Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), and sponsored by the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO), the Eindhoven AI Systems Institute (EAISI) and ORTEC.
Contacts:
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Radhika Kulkarni
2022 INFORMS President
Vice President, Advanced Analytics R&D (retd.)
SAS Institute Inc.
Durham NC
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