Evolving Pacing Strategies for Team Pursuit Track Cycling

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimization framework using metaheuristics to improve team pursuit cycling strategies, resulting in significantly better performance than current methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel metaheuristic-based approach to evolve and optimize cycling strategies for team pursuit, surpassing existing strategies.

Findings

Metaheuristics outperform current strategies

Significant reduction in race times achieved

Effective framework for real-world cycling strategy optimization

Abstract

Team pursuit track cycling is a bicycle racing sport held on velodromes and is part of the Summer Olympics. It involves the use of strategies to minimize the overall time that a team of cyclists needs to complete a race. We present an optimisation framework for team pursuit track cycling and show how to evolve strategies using metaheuristics for this interesting real-world problem. Our experimental results show that these heuristics lead to significantly better strategies than state-of-art strategies that are currently used by teams of cyclists.