Airlift Challenge: A Competition for Optimizing Cargo Delivery

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Airlift Challenge, a competition using a simulator to optimize cargo delivery under disruptions, and presents a temporal PDDL model for the core Pickup and Delivery Problem.

Contribution

It presents a new simulation environment for airlift cargo optimization and introduces a temporal PDDL domain for generalized planning in this context.

Findings

Participants developed algorithms for cargo scheduling.

The simulator evaluated solutions across increasing difficulty scenarios.

The paper discusses initial results and future directions.

Abstract

Airlift operations require the timely distribution of various cargo, much of which is time sensitive and valuable. These operations, however, have to contend with sudden disruptions from weather and malfunctions, requiring immediate rescheduling. The Airlift Challenge competition seeks possible solutions via a simulator that provides a simplified abstraction of the airlift problem. The simulator uses an OpenAI gym interface that allows participants to create an algorithm for planning agent actions. The algorithm is scored using a remote evaluator against scenarios of ever-increasing difficulty. The second iteration of the competition was underway from November 2023 to April 2024. This paper describes the competition, simulation environment, and results. As a step towards applying generalized planning techniques to the problem, a temporal PDDL domain is presented for the Pickup and Delivery Problem, a model which lies at the core of the Airlift Challenge.