A team of five students from KAIST and Inha University has won the first prize in the INFORMS O. R. & Analytics Student Team Competition (ORATC), held by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), one of the most prestigious institutes in industrial engineering and business. The team was composed of Jiansong Wan and Chunxi Huang from the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Guoyan An from the School of Computing, and Dongheon Lee and Seonghyun Cho from Inha University.

ORATC, now in its third year, aims to “provide the opportunity to solve real-world workplace challenges” for undergraduate or master’s level students. Teams are given a business problem along with related data sets and software. This year’s challenge was to design a network system that optimizes General Motors’ vehicle delivery routes for autonomous vehicles (AV).

The KAIST team developed a dynamic routing policy based on heuristic routing. This enabled the program to determine a better path to the destination when met by an interruption, such as a lack of storage capacity at the Vehicle Distribution Center (VDC). The team employed AVs in the last leg delivery from the final VDC to the dealers, which allowed shorter travel distance for the trucks. According to the proposal, this decreased the total cost per vehicle by 20% and the lead time by 30%, which corresponds to higher customer satisfaction.

The teams were judged based on “the clarity of the solution, the technical strength of methodology, and the uniqueness of approach,” emphasizing the value of an analytical approach. The KAIST team was commended by the judges for their “exceptional performance on their model and the most effective use of autonomous vehicles.” Chun-Xi Huang, the presenter of the team, commented that their presentation “provided interesting insights and quantitative results of how AVs can improve the vehicle delivery process.”

Out of the 292 teams from 25 countries who participated in the competition, six student teams were selected as finalists to present in front of the committee in Austin, Texas, from which the KAIST-Inha team was selected as first place. The team received a 7,500 USD cash prize on September 19.