PA Governor’s School Team Ties 8 AI World Records with Vehicle Routing Problem

Not only did the students think of clever ways to solve routing problems, at present, the team has tied eight world records in artificial intelligence. For comparison, the current record holders for one of these problems, C201, are two post-doctoral researchers funded by the SMARTRANS Programme of the Research Council of Norway. AI Problems and their record breaking solutions are maintained by the Scandinavian logistics company, SINTEF, who standardizes the problems and evaluates new submissions. In order to maintain equivalence between attempts, each program vying for a record must use the same map, with the same number of customers, with the same time windows, same sized trucks, and same amount of cargo, etc…. The current world record solving for 1200 customers investigates “1.2 billion 3-opt moves in 14 seconds, an average of 12 ns per move.”[1] The solution developed by the high-schoolers of PGSS is absolutely identical to the current proposed solution. Efforts are still underway to further optimize the student solution for this problem, as well as a similar VRPTW with randomized customer maps.