David Torres Sanchez (Senior Research Associate working on OR-MASTER and CENTRAL Member) and Matthew Bold (STOR-i PhD Student) placed 5th in the finals of the ROADEF/EURO 2020 Challenge.

The results were announced on the 14th of July at the closing ceremony of the EURO 2021 Conference.

The challenge is jointly organised by the French Operational Research and Decision Support Society (ROADEF) and the European Operational Research Society (EURO). This year’s competition was sponsored by RTE (the electricity transmission system operator of France), who provided the problem description and data. The problem concerned a stochastic scheduling problem with resource constraints, which is applied to schedule maintenance interventions on power lines across the grid accounting for the risk associated with these.

The teams that competed in this challenges were composed by academics and practitioners from all over the world. David and Matthew’s team used a math-based heuristic for the problem and climbed ranks over the 2 different elimination stages (qualification and semi-finals).

More information about the challenge and the results can be found on the following link: ROADEF/EURO 2020 challenge final results