The problem for this year’s challenge was determining the most optimal method to board and disembark an airplane. Over five days our team created a stochastic model in Python that was able to determine the fastest method to board and disembark a plane, whilst also considering a range of real-world constraints such as luggage, groups, disobedience and no shows.
With this paper our team won the New Zealand round of the competition, and our paper was remarked in the international round. In this international round there were 58 teams from 31 countries. Out of these teams are paper was awarded the outstanding award. This is the highest level of recognition awarded at the competition and is only given to the best 3 teams. As a flow on from our success we were invited to present our findings to Air New Zealand and attended the New Zealand Hi-Tec Awards.
My role within the team was one of two programmers, where I was responsible for developing the disembarking model and a library that visualized people leaving the plane. Due to the time constrained nature of the competition and large parts of the code being written while we were sleep deprived, the codebase is quite messy and often improper stylistic practices are used. I plan on revisiting this project in the future to tidy up and create documentation for the code.