📈 Good OR vibes, a CVRP challenge, VRP transforming logistics
Local Optimum: short, imperfect-yet-useful ideas - Edition #21
Welcome to a new edition of Local Optimum: a short, imperfect-yet-useful collection of ideas related to optimization, decision-making, and applied Operations Research.
Let’s dive in! 🪂
1) 🌊 Good OR vibes
Having the right instructors at university can shape your career.
I know it first-hand as I started my OR journey because of that
But when those instructors bring passion and excitement, that’s even more powerful. Recently, I’ve seen great enthusiasm towards OR in academic environments:
Michael Watson is excited to teach Supply Chain Modeling.
Jesper Larsen sees strong interest in OR from his students.
Laura Albert shares her energy and excitement à la Michael Watson.
It’s inspiring to see this momentum for Operations Research, optimization, and decision-making, and I hope those good vibes continue like that 🤞🏻
2) 🚚 A CVRP challenge
The CVRPLIB team is launching a 30-day global competition to push the boundaries of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP).
What’s new?
100 XL benchmark instances: diversified and realistic, with 1,000 to 10,000 customers.
A real-time leaderboard tracking both per-instance and overall progress.
Certificates for the overall winner and for teams discovering new Best Known Solutions.
Key dates:
📅 Jan 12, 2026 → Competition starts (official XL instances released)
📅 Feb 11, 2026 → Competition ends
This is a rare chance to showcase classical algorithms, ML-based methods, or hybrid optimization approaches on one of the toughest CVRPs ever released.
3) 🍕 VRP transforming logistics
Delivering pizzas around the city can be daunting.
Not only because of the competition with other pizzerias, but also because you can pick up power-ups to improve your speed or time.
Oh no, that was one of my favorite videogames back in the 90s, Radikal Bikers.
Anyway, it’s a complex problem as you need to take into account a number of factors like:
The location of customers
The capacity of vehicles
The size of orders
Traffic conditions
Time constraints
The goal of the VRP is to find a set of routes that minimizes the total cost or time of the delivery operation, while satisfying all of the constraints.
But how can you solve it easily? And what applications of it are in the real world?
Read more here:
Common sources of distrust in OR projects
Next Monday, I’ll share a crucial topic for Operations Research projects: trust.
Or, better said, sources of distrust.
I’ll cover:
🔑 Why trust is all you need
⚠️ Common sources of distrust
🌱 How to overcome them
If you’ve ever felt a lack of confidence in your optimization project or team, this will be useful. See you Monday!
And that’s it for today!
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Have a nice day ahead ☀️
Borja.
