On Nov 29th, AI Lab PhD students Florent Delgrange, Raphael Avaros, Mathieu Reymond and Eugenio Bargiacchi won the third prize at the Smart Shipping Hackathon organized by De Vlaamse Waterweg, Antwerp Management School and EY.
They proposed an AI-based solution to solve the challenge of corridor management in waterways. This challenge involves multiple actors or resources such as barges, locks and ports, and is currently based on a first-come first-served algorithm, which is highly inefficient. Their new approach makes use of multi-agent reinforcement learning-based scheduling algorithms, which are able to significantly improve the current system on several levels. This results in a flexible and scalable solution capable of reducing barge fuel consumption and making shipping a better competitor to other modes of transport without additional hardware for the different actors.
Congratulations Florent, Raphael, Mathieu and Eugenio!