Two first prize at INFORMS 2024

🏅Hard work truly pays off, and good things come in pairs!🏅 I’m thrilled to share that I have received two 1st Prizes in the Railway Application Section (RAS) Student Paper Competition and Problem-Solving Competition at the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting.

📝 In the Student Paper Competition, our work focused on optimizing shunting yard schedules. The title of our paper is: “Integrated Optimization of Train Makeup Problem and Resource Scheduling for Railroad Shunting Yards: A Hybrid MILP and CP Formulation with Logic-Based Benders Decomposition.”

🚂 For this year’s RAS Problem-Solving Competition, our team (RailSparks-BJTU) proposed a novel methodology for optimizing railroad flat yard switching through a shunting action network and a corresponding integer programming model. We applied techniques such as lazy constraints, symmetry breaking, and sequential optimization to solve instances of varying scales in seconds.