Felix Prause and his team ZIB won the first place at the 11th annual AIMMS-MOPTA Modeling Competition under the supervision of Kai Hoppmann and Prof. Thorsten Koch. Felix was honored in the context of the MOPTA conference, which took place on August 14.-16. in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA.
The aim of the competition is to attract young scientists to the field of combinatorial optimization. Among the participating teams from all over the world, the top three were invited to give a lecture at the MOPTA to determine the final winner. Congratulations to Felix and Team ZIB as well as to the two second placed teams Gomory Paper Cuts and UCL!
The subject of this year’s competition was the Automated Design of Assortments, a generalized version of the 2-dimensional Cutting Stock problem. Here, rectangles must be placed in a container and then a set of arrangements is selected based on differences between the individual arrangements.
The picture shows (from left to right) Tamás Terlaky (Lehigh), Felix Prause (ZIB), Mohan Chiriki (AIMMS), and Boris Defourny (Lehigh).
Photo credit: Ana Quiroz.
Links: http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~mopta/competition