Authors: Florian Krempl, Martin Borkovec, Philipp Satlawa

“The TIMETOACT Hackathon was a great opportunity to test our coding skills, meet interesting people, learn something new and have a lot of fun while doing it.”

On May 13th 2022 the hybrid "TIMETOACT Hackathon: Sustainable Logistics Simulation" was held at the beautiful Parkhotel Schönbrunn and was also open for remote participants from all over the world. We, a team of three data scientists, took part in it on-site and we want to share a bit about the great experience we had.

In the simulation, each participant owned a truck and our goal was to program an agent, which would decide how to choose from a list of available transports and how to proceed in case no suitable offer could be identified. A new simulation run was started every five to ten minutes using the most recent builds. The current state was displayed on a highly elaborate dashboard, providing us with immediate feedback on how our agent was faring.

The competition consisted of two separate rounds. During the first round, the goal was to simply maximise efficiency and thereby profit. Our team managed to narrowly achieve victory by focusing on transports with the highest profit per hour and by gravitating towards the center of the map in the absence of offers.

During the lunch break, we enjoyed a great meal and had the opportunity to get to know our competitors and discuss our successful as well as our failed strategies.

The second round's theme was sustainability. To account for this, additional costs to offset emissions were implemented into the simulation. Furthermore, our drivers now needed to sleep every so often to keep the risk of costly incidents low and the locations were open for loading and unloading only during certain hours of the day.

After the event officially ended, a large group of the participants went for an after-hackathon get together and we all agreed that we are all looking forward to the next TIMETOACT Hackathon!