Amazon Last-Mile Routing Research Challenge Uncovers New Research Methods on a Global Scale
MIT Supply Chain Frontiers
The Unconventional Approach to Research
This challenge by itself is also a little bit unconventional because traditionally we would do research all by ourselves. And this time, since this field is so new, there's very little research being done or at least being publicly available in this space of using machine learning for route planning and route optimization. We came up with the idea of doing this as a challenge to engage pretty much the entire research community. It kind of crowdsources ideas. Our intention behind kind of supporting Amazon with hosting this challenge was also not to find the ultimate solution to the route planning problem that we're trying to solve. But it's rather about sparking ideas and letting different members of a team or even different teams cross pollinate each
