Two undergraduate teams from ShanghaiTech under the guidance of SEM Assistant Professor Liu Baolong, won the first and third prizes respectively in the 12th MathorCup College Mathematical Modeling Challenge. The two teams are composed of students from different majors. The first prize team has one SEM student and two SLST students, and the third prize team has two SEM students and one SIST student.
Most of the competition questions come from the actual business problems, which challenge students in applying their theory to the practice. The students need to flexibly use the knowledge of operations research, system engineering, probability theory and mathematical statistics, information technology to extract mathematical questions from actual problems and do the modeling, and further to solve the problems through the combination of management and economics thoughts. A quick browse to some competition questions which fully reflects the characteristics of “management + technology”.
Cellular base site planning and regional clustering
This problem involves large-scale integer programming modeling. On the basis of modeling analysis and double K-means clustering preprocessing, ShanghaiTech team used simulated annealing, a heuristic optimization algorithm, to optimize the planning of cellular base sites and solve the signal problem in the weak coverage area of the existing network.
Auto-parking
This competition question is derived from Baidu Apollo's Ackerman structure unmanned vehicle. This problem starts with the turning radius of the vehicle for auto-parking and gradually expands to the optimal route selection for auto-parking in the parking lot. To solve the problem, it is necessary to design an algorithm based on the knowledge of system engineering, to plan an auto-parking scheme considering the real-time status (occupancy or vacancy) of the parking lot.
Schematic diagram of selecting the optimal parking route (source: the Challenge question C)
MathorCup is a national-level subject competition for college students. This year, the competition was very fierce which attracted 8,970 teams from 722 colleges and universities. To be outstanding among the participated teams, ShanghaiTech teams leverage the advantages of integration of disciplines, so as reflecting the management + technology training model and educating concept of SEM. In the future, SEM will continue to be student-oriented, and be committed to cultivating high-level comprehensive talents.