Center for Transportation and Logistics

Routing is one of the most studied problems in operations research; even small improvements in routing efficiency can save companies money and result in energy savings and reduced environmental impacts. Now, three teams of researchers from universities around the world have received prize money totaling $175,000 for their innovative route optimization models.

The three teams were the winners of the Amazon Last-Mile Routing Research Challenge, through which the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (MIT CTL) and Amazon engaged with a global community of researchers across a range of disciplines, from computer science to business operations to supply chain management, challenging them to build data-driven route optimization models leveraging massive historical route execution data.

First announced in February, the research challenge attracted more than 2,000 participants from around the world. Two hundred twenty-nine researcher teams formed during the spring to independently develop solutions that incorporated driver know-how into route optimization models with the intent that they would outperform traditional optimization approaches. Out of the 48 teams whose models qualified for the final round of the challenge, three teams’ work stood out above the rest. Amazon provided real operational training data for the models and evaluated submissions, with technical support from MIT CTL scientists.

In real life, drivers frequently deviate from planned and mathematically optimized route sequences. Drivers carry information about which roads are hard to navigate when traffic is bad, when and where they can easily find parking, which stops can be conveniently served together, and many other factors that existing optimization models simply don’t capture.

Each model addressed the challenge data in a unique way. The methodological approaches chosen by the participants frequently combined traditional exact and heuristic optimization approaches with nontraditional machine learning methods. On the machine learning side, the most commonly adopted methods were different variants of artificial neural networks, as well as inverse reinforcement learning approaches.

There were 45 submissions that reached the finalist phase, with team members hailing from 29 countries. Entrants spanned all levels of higher education from final-year undergraduate students to retired faculty. Entries were assessed in a double-blind review process so that the judges would not know what team was attached to each entry.

The third-place prize of $25,000 was awarded to Okan Arslan and Rasit Abay. Okan is a professor at HEC Montréal, and Rasit is a doctoral student at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The runner-up prize at $50,000 was awarded to MIT’s own Xiaotong Guo, Qingyi Wang, and Baichuan Mo, all doctoral students. The top prize of $100,000 was awarded to Professor William Cook of the University of Waterloo in Canada, Professor Stephan Held of the University of Bonn in Germany, and Professor Emeritus Keld Helsgaun of Roskilde University in Denmark. Congratulations to all winners and contestants were held via webinar on July 30.

Top-performing teams may be interviewed by Amazon for research roles in the company’s Last Mile organization. MIT CTL will publish and promote short technical papers written by all finalists and might invite top-performing teams to present at MIT. Further, a team led by Matthias Winkenbach, director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab, will guest-edit a special issue of Transportation Science, one of the most renowned academic journals in this field, featuring academic papers on topics related to the problem tackled by the research challenge. More