Scientific Prize Results

Two teams are ex-aequo winners. Congratulations to them !

  • Team S9 (Nabil Absi, Diego Cattaruzza, Dominique Feillet, Frédéric Semet, Maxime Ogier, Ecole des Mines Saint Etienne, Ecole Centrale Lille, France ) : A heuristic branch-cut-and-price algorithm for the ROADEF/EURO challenge on Inventory Routing
  • Team J9 (Tamara Jovanovic, Ecole des Mines d’Alès, France) : Lower Bound and Important Observations on the Logistic Ratio objective for Inventory Routing Problem

Due to an unfortunate mistake in the submission management, the paper of team J9 has not been considered during the reviewing phase of the scientific prize committee. In accordance with the jury, the Challenge ROADEF/EURO committee decided to consider the team J9 submission for a reviewing process and the scientific committee decided that Tamara Jovanovic deserves to be ex-aequo winner. Congratulations to the winners !

Scientific Prize Rules

There are two mandatory conditions to participate to the scientific prize :

  • The first one is to be a finalist team of the roadef/euro challenge 2016 ;
  • The second is that the code submitted for the final phase should be able to produce a feasible solution for at least one of the X instances.

The president of the committee is Roberto Wolfer Calvo (Full professor at Paris 13).

The committee is composed by the following scientific experts :

  • Jean André (Operations Research & Data Science Team Manager, Air Liquide) ;
  • Leandro Coelho (Professor at University Laval in Quebec) ;
  • Frédéric Gardi (Managing Partner at LocalSolver),
  • Christian Prins (Full Professor at the University of Technology of Troyes) ;
  • Emiliano Traversi (Associate Professor at Paris 13) ;
  • Roberto Wolfler Calvo (Full Professor at Paris 13).

The method must be described in a short paper (about 8-12 pages), which should contain all the elements necessary to assess the quality and the originality of the proposed method.

The deadline for submitting the paper and the related, eventually updated/new code, is October 31, 2016. The code should be able to produce good feasible solutions within reasonable running time. The submitted code will be executed on a specific platform to be detailed later.

The main criteria that will be used for evaluating the proposed methods are the following :

  • originality of the proposed method.
  • proof (theoretically and/or experimentally) of the quality of the produced results (lower bounds and/or upper bounds or their gaps with respect to the best known results) ;
  • interesting features, such as but not limited to, new and/or good dual bounds ;
  • decomposition methods developed in order to solve subproblems to optimality or to a very good lower bound ;

The weight on the criteria will be refined by the committee.

An extended version of the paper will be reviewed for publication in a special section of a regular issue of Transportation Science. The call for paper of Transportation Science will open in July 2016 (the end of the current ROADEF/EURO challenge) and will close six months later around January 2017. To submit to this special section any approach that was not among the finalists of the challenge ROADEF/EURO 2016, must be tested on the ROADEF/EURO challenge instances.