Winner of the 2017 Canadian Operational Research Society Practice Prize

This project was derived from a real-life loading problem arising at one of the leading tire manufacturer. Because there exists a wide range of agricultural tires, each shipment is unique and container loading plans have to be determined on a per case basis. From a theoretical perspective, dealing with circular shapes differs significantly from classical rectangular box packing problems. The team studied several solution approaches and eventually proposed an innovative and efficient method. They highlighted the parameters that were key to the success of this method. Insights gain from this research study have been used in TMS.

Each year the Canadian Operational Research Society conducts a competition on the practice of operational research to recognize the challenging application of the OR approach to the solution of applied problems.

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In 2017, this prize was awarded to a team with Philippe Grangier, Marc Brisson, Louis-Martin Rousseau (JDA Labs) and John Ye (TMS Team) together with Michel Gendreau (Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada) and Fabien Lehuédé (IMT Atlantique, France). The team received this award at the 21st Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) held in Quebec City in July 2017.

Mixed Reality Visualization

In addition, the research code has been integrated in another JDA Labs project that focuses on 3D vizualization of instruction-based tasks (featured in project video.) This proved to be useful in expanding the scope of the 3D instruction interface, instructAR, which was originally designed for pallet building.