CVRPLIB Best Known Solution (BKS) Challenge

[Alice Raffaele]

Dear AIROYoungers,

I forward you the announcement of this exciting competition on large instances of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem.

For any questions, you can contact Anand Subramanian, copied to this email, who is one of the organizers.

Best,

Alice

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The CVRPLIB team is launching a 30-day competition to push the boundaries of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP): https://vrp.atd-lab.inf.puc-rio.br/index.php/en/bks-challenge

🔹 The focus: our new XL benchmark set — 100 diversified and realistic CVRP instances with 1,000 to 10,000 customers.

🔹 The goal: find exceptionally high-quality solutions, ideally just a few units away from the unknown optima.

🔹 The setup: a real-time Leaderboard will track progress for each instance and globally. Certificates will be awarded to the overall winner and to teams finding final BKSs.

Show the strengths of classical, ML-based, or hybrid optimization approaches!

📅 Key dates:

Aug 24, 2025 – Official announcement, training instance generator released

Dec 12, 2025 – Team registration opens

Jan 12, 2026 – Competition starts (official XL instances released)

Feb 11, 2026 – Competition ends

We look forward to seeing the community take on this challenge!

Organizers: Rafael Martinelli, Eduardo Queiroga, Anand Subramanian, Eduardo Uchoa, Thibaut Vidal