This year marks the 13th edition of the AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition.
This year's MOPTA conference will be held at Lehigh University from August 2-4, 2021. The 13th Optimization Modeling Competition is now open and submissions are due by May 21st, 2021.
The goal of this year's competition is to develop frameworks to solve the H-SARA (Home - Service Appointment, Routing, and Appointment Scheduling) problem. The aim is to efficiently hire and assign teams to customers requesting service appointments at home. The different decisions that need to be optimized here are:
- How many service teams are required on a particular day?
- Which customers are serviced by which team and in which order?
We believe this will be a problem of huge interest with the recent lifestyle changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, an increasing number of professionals are working remotely from their homes, driving up the load on internet networks. Internet providers need to ensure that they are maintaining/upgrading their network to be able to meet this increased demand. Another example is grocery deliveries, which must be fulfilled within a specific time window.
This builds on last year's problem (facility location, fleet sizing, and routing) by going one step deeper on the tactical planning side (what happens on a team's service route) and by introducing stochasticity. Customer demand, the duration of an appointment at a customer, and the likelihood of cancellation are all to be randomly generated to simulate a real-life scenario. By not having deterministic data, the emphasis is put on the methodology to solve this problem in a general way.
Eligibility for the competition
Teams of at most three students can participate. The team leader must be a graduate student, though the other members of the team can be advanced undergraduate students. Each member of the team must be registered as a full-time student at a recognized educational institution during the Spring term of the 2020-2021 Academic Year. Students with any background are eligible. Collaboration between students from different departments is strongly encouraged.
AIMMS Academic License
Get your free AIMMS Academic license to solve the problem using AIMMS, and register for the competition.
We welcome you to share this with your academic network if you know someone who could be interested!
Read about last year’s competition