Welcome

The VeRoLog Solver Challenge 2019 revolves around an exciting routing problem which combines distribution and subsequent installation of equipment, such as vending machines. We challenge you to use your creativity, problem solving and programming skills to find the cheapest solution.

Please click here for detailed information about the challenge, including the problem description, official rules and awards. The timeline below shows the important dates.

Winners announcement

After running the solvers of all the finalists on the set of hidden instances, the final ranking of the finalists in the restricted resources challenge was determined. A CSV file of all scores per team, seed and instance can be found here. Based on these scores, the final ranking is as follows:

Final rank	Team	Mean rank for hidden instances
1	UOS	1.24
2	mjg	2
3	COKA coders	4.56
4	orlab	4.8
5	TCS explorer	5.32
6	aavk	5.88
7	wanderer	5.96
8	justFall	6.24

This means that the prize winners of this year's VeRoLog Solver Challenge are:

1st prize	Team UOS	Benjamin Graf	Osnabrück University, Germany
2nd prize	Team mjg	Martin Josef Geiger	Helmut-Schmidt-University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Germany
3rd prize	Team COKA coders	Caroline Jagtenberg, Andrea Raith, Michael Sundvick, Kevin Shen, Oliver Maclaren, and Andrew Mason	The University of Auckland, New Zealand

The prizes were awarded during the gala dinner at the VeRoLog conference in Seville on June 4, 2019 (see photo below).

Congratulations to all winners, and a huge thank you to all participants for making this VeRoLog Solver Challenge such an interesting and rewarding experience!

Finalists announcement

After having validated and processed all the submitted solvers, we are pleased to announce the finalists of the restricted resources challenge. The following teams -in alphabetic order- have reached the final:

Team
aavk
COKA coders
justFall
mjg
orlab
TCS explorer
UOS
wanderer

Congratulations to all finalists! The final results of the restricted resources challenge will be announced -and the prizes will be awarded- during the gala dinner of the VeRoLog meeting in Seville on 4 June https://verolog2019.sciencesconf.org.

Special thanks

ORTEC and VeRoLog acknowledge the support of FICO, GUROBI and IBM for providing licenses of their solvers Xpress, GUROBI and CPLEX respectively! This allows ORTEC to make use of these solvers in the finals, and therefore your programs may call on any of these solvers.

May you require a personal license for the sake of developing your programs for the challenge, please note that these companies implement academic initiatives, see:

FICO: https://community.fico.com/s/academic-programs
GUROBI: http://www.gurobi.com/academia/academia-center
IBM: http://ibm.biz/AI_CPLEX128

Those that participate in the challenge and want to use any of these solvers but are not eligible within the corresponding academic initiatives, may contact respectively:

FICO: Timo Berthold (TimoBerthold@fico.com)
GUROBI: Frédéric Baumann (baumann@gurobi.com)
IBM: Sofiane Oussedik (soussedik@fr.ibm.com)

History

The VeRoLog Solver Challenge (VSC) is aimed at promoting the development of effective algorithms for real-world applications in Vehicle Routing. The problem subject of the challenge is selected by VeRoLog in collaboration with a company. PTV organized the first and second editions of the VSC in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The third edition, held in 2017, was organized by ORTEC; see https://verolog2017.ortec.com/ for more information.