HUAWEI Logistics Competition

Vehicle Routing and Bin Packing are classical multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) problems. So far, most research is conducted on artificial data. However, artificial data cannot always reflect the difficulty of real-world problems. To promote the research and application on real-world problems, we together with Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab organize the competition “EMO2021 HUAWEI Logistics Competition” at the 11th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO 2021). The competition uses the dataset generated from real business scenarios of Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Fig. Illustration of the MOCO problem of the competition

Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Every year, Huawei ships a lot of cargoes to the world, most of them are loaded and transported in containers. In this competition, the delivery of each order is formulated as a MOCO problem. As shown in Figure 1, it involves one starting point (i.e., parking lot), one delivery point (i.e., port) and multiple pickup points. Each pickup point has a set of items (i.e., boxes with different sizes and weights) that need to be transported to the delivery point. Multiple types of container trucks can be employed. The two objectives of the MOCO problem are to maximize the loading rate as well as to minimize the traveling distance under specific constraints and requirements. It should be noted that each order corresponds to one MOCO test instance, and the orders are independent of each other. For more information about the competition problem, please visit: https://www.noahlab.com.hk/logistics-ranking/#/competition_details

The competition consists of two tracks. Track 1 aims to examine the participants’ ability in algorithm design. The algorithm performance will be compared under a given number of function evaluations and a given running time. Track 2 investigates the participants’ comprehensive ability in both algorithm design and engineering implementation. The algorithm performance will be compared under a given running time only. The winners will be awarded cash prizes and trophies, i.e., Track 1: 1st Prize: 5000$, 2nd Prize: 3000$, 3rd Prize: 2000$ and Track 2: 1st Prize: 5000$. The winners are required to register and give spot-light talks at EMO 2021.

The competition timeline is as follows:

Nov. 9, 2020: Start of competition

Mar 1, 2021: End of competition

Mar 15, 2021: Announcement of results

Mar 28-31, 2021: Winners’ presentation

Competition results

Gold prize of Track 1: The team of Qingling Zhu, Fei Liu with faculty advisors Qingfu Zhang of City University of Hong Kong.

Silver prize of Track 1: The team of Han Zhang with faculty advisors Xin Yao, Qing Li of Southern University of Science and Technology.

Bronze prize of Track 1: The team of Yan zhang, Lingxiao Chen, and Qingji Ma of Quadtalent Technology.

Best prize of Track 2: The team of Yan zhang, Lingxiao Chen, and Qingji Ma of Quadtalent Technology.