Brown CS News

A Brown CS Team Takes Third Place At The Thirteenth AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition

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Click the links that follow for more news about Enrique Areyan Viqueira, Serdar Kadioglu, and other recent accomplishments by Brown CS alumsstudents, and faculty.

Last week, a two-person Brown CS team achieved a significant honor in the field of applied optimization. "Flamerunners" was composed of Master's student Shamay Samuel and alum Enrique Areyan Viqueira, and coached by Professor Serdar Kadioglu. After being chosen as a finalist from a pool of fourteen applicants, they won third place at the thirteenth annual Advanced Interactive Multidimensional Modeling System-Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications (AIMMS-MOPTA) Modeling Competition. 

MOPTA is an international conference that aims to bring together a diverse group of people from both discrete and continuous optimization, working on both theoretical and applied aspects. Held this year in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it included a number of invited talks from distinguished speakers and contributed talks, spread over three days.  

This year's competition focused on various services (health care, beauty care, banking, and more) offered to individuals in their homes, aiming to address specific critical operational decision problems. Stochasticity is an intrinsic property of the home service assignment, routing, and appointment scheduling (H-SARA) problem, and the focus was on solving H-SARA under three key random factors: service duration, travel time, and customer cancellation. Each team’s goal was to develop an efficient and implementable method to solve H-SARA that will then be used by home service providers.

"Shamay and Enrique designed a novel solution to a challenging optimization problem with business-critical applications," says Serdar. "I am proud of their hard work and glad to see that it is recognized in the broader community.”

The team's submission for the contest is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.