Amazon’s Last Mile Team is is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics on a competition designed to improve product deliveries. The Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge will ask academic teams to train machine learning models to predict the delivery routes chosen by experienced drivers. Amazon will provide training data for the models and will evaluate the submissions with support from MIT scientists.
The first place winner will receive $100,000, the second, $50,000, and the third place finisher will receive $25,000. In addition, MIT will publish and promote technical papers about the top-performing models. Teams may be interviewed by Amazon for research positions in the Last Mile organization and be invited to present their work at MIT.
“We are encouraging participants to develop innovative approaches leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and other non-conventional methods,” says Julian Pachon, director and chief scientist at Amazon Last Mile, in a statement. “The contest is seeking to produce solutions to the route-sequencing problem that outperform traditional, optimization-driven operations research methods in terms of solution quality and computational cost.”
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