NCKU information management research team shines in RAS problem-solving competition
Tainan, Taiwan, December 9, 2016
A Tainan-based research team led by Professor I-Lin Wang from the Department of Industrial and Information Management (IIM) in National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) won the 2nd place award in the 2016 problem-solving competition held by the INFORMS Railway Application Section, the university revealed today.
Fu-Yuan Cheng, a Ph.D. student, and Sih-Han Fang, a master student, instructed by Professor Wang participated in the world competition in which USD 3750 prize money is offered.
According to Professor Wang, there were 43 teams from 11 countries, including China, Germany, France, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Taiwan, UK, and the United States, registering for the competition, and finally 12 of them submitted their final reports.
Most team members are from departments of Industrial Engineering, management science, information science, computational mathematics, and traffic management. Therefore, this competition is very competitive, he added.
Participants were asked to address the real world problem of scheduling train movements (production) together with maintenance operations that keep the network usable, for a complex railway network.
The main challenges of the problem come from complicated infrastructure capacity regulations, and the heavy interactions between train timetabling and maintenance task scheduling.
This is a hard problem since it involves two sets of decisions: train routings and time tablings, where both integer variables (for routings) and fractional variables (for timetabling) are both involved, Professor Wang noted.
He continued, the given case was specifically designed so that it could not be directly solved by conventional optimization software within hours.
Professor Wang and his team members spent about two months to come out with a Mixed Integer Programming formulation (MIP), a clever and efficient algorithm, and a visualization tool to validate the calculated solutions. In particular, in the preprocessing stage, they first analyze the data, define an elementary component for constructing a train route, and manually identify and record the conflicting relations between components.
Based on the relationships between components, they construct a block-based time-space network, and solve a shortest path to calculate good feasible train routes.
After all train routes are determined, they further fine tune the solution by an MIP model. To help have better insights, they design a visualization tool that can display the movements of trains and maintenance tasks over time. Any conflict in routing or time can easily be identified.
This is already the 5th time award by NCKU in attending the RAS problem solving competition.
Before this year, NCKU has also won the honorable mentions in 2010, 2013, 3rd place award in 2011, and the 2nd place award in 2014.
As the only team that has won 5 awards in a row in this competition, this shows NCKU is strong in operations research, industrial engineering, and transportation science.
Professor Wang in recent 5 years has advised students to win 21 awards in master thesis or paper competitions and 4 awards in undergraduate student project or paper competitions hosted by the OR Society of Taiwan (ORSTW), Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineering (CIIE), and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan.
Professor Wang has received many awards, including the best poster award in the OR subdivision of the MOST Industrial Engineering division in 2009 and 2016, Lu Feng-Chang Medal in Management in 2013 by the Chinese Management Association, the honorable mention of the Young Researcher Innovated Research Competition in 2013 by Taiwan Comprehensive University System. He is also a member of the Center for Railway Studies in NCKU.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (OR), management science (MS), and business analytics.
The Railway Applications Section (RAS) is one of the INFORMS sub-groups that facilitates productivity improvements and growth in the rail industry through appropriate application of ORMS techniques. RAS held its seventh problem-solving competition this year (2016).
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A Tainan-based research team led by Professor I-Lin Wang from the Department of Industrial and Information Management (IIM) in National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) won the 2nd place award in the 2016 problem-solving competition held by the INFORMS Railway Application Section, the university revealed today.
Fu-Yuan Cheng, a Ph.D. student, and Sih-Han Fang, a master student, instructed by Professor Wang participated in the world competition in which USD 3750 prize money is offered.
According to Professor Wang, there were 43 teams from 11 countries, including China, Germany, France, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Taiwan, UK, and the United States, registering for the competition, and finally 12 of them submitted their final reports.
Most team members are from departments of Industrial Engineering, management science, information science, computational mathematics, and traffic management. Therefore, this competition is very competitive, he added.
Participants were asked to address the real world problem of scheduling train movements (production) together with maintenance operations that keep the network usable, for a complex railway network.
The main challenges of the problem come from complicated infrastructure capacity regulations, and the heavy interactions between train timetabling and maintenance task scheduling.
This is a hard problem since it involves two sets of decisions: train routings and time tablings, where both integer variables (for routings) and fractional variables (for timetabling) are both involved, Professor Wang noted.
He continued, the given case was specifically designed so that it could not be directly solved by conventional optimization software within hours.
Professor Wang and his team members spent about two months to come out with a Mixed Integer Programming formulation (MIP), a clever and efficient algorithm, and a visualization tool to validate the calculated solutions. In particular, in the preprocessing stage, they first analyze the data, define an elementary component for constructing a train route, and manually identify and record the conflicting relations between components.
Based on the relationships between components, they construct a block-based time-space network, and solve a shortest path to calculate good feasible train routes.
After all train routes are determined, they further fine tune the solution by an MIP model. To help have better insights, they design a visualization tool that can display the movements of trains and maintenance tasks over time. Any conflict in routing or time can easily be identified.
This is already the 5th time award by NCKU in attending the RAS problem solving competition.
Before this year, NCKU has also won the honorable mentions in 2010, 2013, 3rd place award in 2011, and the 2nd place award in 2014.
As the only team that has won 5 awards in a row in this competition, this shows NCKU is strong in operations research, industrial engineering, and transportation science.
Professor Wang in recent 5 years has advised students to win 21 awards in master thesis or paper competitions and 4 awards in undergraduate student project or paper competitions hosted by the OR Society of Taiwan (ORSTW), Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineering (CIIE), and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan.
Professor Wang has received many awards, including the best poster award in the OR subdivision of the MOST Industrial Engineering division in 2009 and 2016, Lu Feng-Chang Medal in Management in 2013 by the Chinese Management Association, the honorable mention of the Young Researcher Innovated Research Competition in 2013 by Taiwan Comprehensive University System. He is also a member of the Center for Railway Studies in NCKU.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (OR), management science (MS), and business analytics.
The Railway Applications Section (RAS) is one of the INFORMS sub-groups that facilitates productivity improvements and growth in the rail industry through appropriate application of ORMS techniques. RAS held its seventh problem-solving competition this year (2016).
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