The Problem Solving Competition (PSC) organized by RAS - the Railway Application Section of Informs - has been proposing interesting, relevant problems to the academic community since 2010.The Problem Solving Competition presents real-life railroad application problems along with dataset(s) and solutions publicly available for anyone to research, develop and test solution approaches.
For those problems, researchers may showcase their results, engage in questions, answers and discussions, and measure the performance of different solution approaches. The winners gets an economic reward, as well as the possibility to publish quickly their approach in a leading scientific journal.
We are pleased to announce to the Informs community the winners for this year, which were presented few days ago at the annual meeting in Philadelphia:
First place goes to IRA Group, Negin Alemazkoor, Conrad Ruppert, Hadi Meidani; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US
Second place goes to Uniandes Team of Stochastic Optimization- UTSO Iván Cárdenas Gallo, Carlos Sarmiento Cardona, Gilberto Morales Zamora; Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
and third place is for TCS Explorers: Sadir Kumar Sinha, Sumit Raut, Harshad Kadilkar; Tata Consultancy Services, India
An honorable mention goes to the Tunisian Team/VNP: Souhir Elleuc, Bassem Jarboui, Nenad Mladenovic; Sfax university, Tunisia and Valenciennes, France
The edition of 2015 was about track geometry analytics, predicting possible failure in a rairoad network, based on past history of failures and inspections. More details online at https://www.informs.org/Community/RAS/Problem-Solving-Competition/2015-RAS-Problem-Solving-Competition
We really thank the sponsors, the problem owner, the judges and especially the teams participants for making it an inspired and interesting challenge!
A new PSC should be published in spring 2016 with deadline end of summer 2016, and final presentation at the next Informs meeting! Further news will be available on the RAS website: https://www.informs.org/Community/RAS/ and via the usual Informs communication channels.
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The PSC chair,
Francesco Corman
Assistant Professor
Delft University of Technnology
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