NCKU research team shines in world problem solving competition
Tainan, Taiwan, October 16, 2013
A research team led by Associate Prof. I-Lin Wang of the Department of Industrial and Information Management at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan, has won the Honorable Mention in the 2013 Problem Solving Competition held by Railway Application Section (RAS), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), United States.
A total of 45 teams registering for the 2013 competition and 12 of them, mostly composed by professors and doctoral students from several renowned universities worldwide, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., have submitted their final reports, according to Wang.
The NCKU research team includes Wang and undergraduate students Wei Lee and Chiao-Yu Liao, who just become junior in the same department this summer.
Wang said, Team NCKU might very likely be the only semi-finalist team composed by junior undergraduate students as team members.
The 2013 competition problem, a hard yard operational problem, seeks an operational plan that minimized the total waiting time of railcars in the yard and maximized the total number of railcars processed during a certain period.
Wang explained, building a classification yard operations plan is challenging as it covers many interrelated operations and decisions, such as the sequence of inbound trains’ disassembly, the sequence of out-bound trains’ assembly, sorting plans at the hump, block-to-train assignment plan for classification tracks, etc.
“Optimizing the operations plan of a classification yard is very important for a railroad company as it helps fully utilize the limited resources of its rail network.”
Wang and his team members spent about 2 months in implementing generic dispatching rules such as FIFO or longest-first heuristics toward this problem.
Since 2003 fall, Wang has supervised students in winning 24 awards in master thesis or paper competitions and 4 awards in undergraduate student projects or paper competitions hosted by the OR Society of Taiwan (ORSTW), Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineering (CIIE) or DHL.
INFORMS, established in 1995, is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the fields of operations research (OR), management science (MS), and business analytics, according to Wang.
He also added that RAS is one of the INFORMS sub-groups that facilitates productivity improvements and growth in the rail industry through appropriate application of ORMS techniques.
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A research team led by Associate Prof. I-Lin Wang of the Department of Industrial and Information Management at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan, has won the Honorable Mention in the 2013 Problem Solving Competition held by Railway Application Section (RAS), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), United States.
A total of 45 teams registering for the 2013 competition and 12 of them, mostly composed by professors and doctoral students from several renowned universities worldwide, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., have submitted their final reports, according to Wang.
The NCKU research team includes Wang and undergraduate students Wei Lee and Chiao-Yu Liao, who just become junior in the same department this summer.
Wang said, Team NCKU might very likely be the only semi-finalist team composed by junior undergraduate students as team members.
The 2013 competition problem, a hard yard operational problem, seeks an operational plan that minimized the total waiting time of railcars in the yard and maximized the total number of railcars processed during a certain period.
Wang explained, building a classification yard operations plan is challenging as it covers many interrelated operations and decisions, such as the sequence of inbound trains’ disassembly, the sequence of out-bound trains’ assembly, sorting plans at the hump, block-to-train assignment plan for classification tracks, etc.
“Optimizing the operations plan of a classification yard is very important for a railroad company as it helps fully utilize the limited resources of its rail network.”
Wang and his team members spent about 2 months in implementing generic dispatching rules such as FIFO or longest-first heuristics toward this problem.
Since 2003 fall, Wang has supervised students in winning 24 awards in master thesis or paper competitions and 4 awards in undergraduate student projects or paper competitions hosted by the OR Society of Taiwan (ORSTW), Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineering (CIIE) or DHL.
INFORMS, established in 1995, is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the fields of operations research (OR), management science (MS), and business analytics, according to Wang.
He also added that RAS is one of the INFORMS sub-groups that facilitates productivity improvements and growth in the rail industry through appropriate application of ORMS techniques.
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