Mats Olthoff and his MODAL RailLab team finished 2nd place at the 10th Annual AIMMS MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition. He was awarded during the MOPTA conference held on August 15-17 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. The competition is designed to attract young researchers from around the world to the field of combinatorial optimization. Hence, it was the perfect opportunity for Mats, who is part of the MODAL RailLab as master student and student assistant, to show his modeling skills. Out of 25 registered teams the best three were selected to compete as finalists at the MOPTA conference for the overall winner. Congratulations Mats and his team and to team Opti Mice who won the first place!
The 2018th edition of the competition dealt with a problem on vehicle routing with stochastic and correlated travel times. A mathematical model optimizing vehicle routes to deliver perishable goods had to be implemented in AIMMS. The travel times for the vehicles were weather dependent and had to be learnt from a set of historical data to come up with good travel time estimations for the actual weather forecast.