We won Honestbee Logistics Challenge 2016

I usually go out and join tech events in the city. I’ve joined several of them, but the most memorable was the event where my friends and I won first prize by solving a delivery optimization problem. The event was hosted by a delivery platform named Honestbee Logistics, which at the time was exploring the possibility of opening a new office in Saigon, Vietnam.

As I remember, the problem was about finding the fastest route to deliver goods, considering a few factors such as the distance between addresses, the weight of the goods, and the value of the goods. We assigned a score in several dimensions, from high to low:

• Distance: nearer deliveries get higher scores

• Weight: lighter packages get higher scores

• Value: higher-value goods get higher scores

I don’t remember the exact formula, but we computed a score for each data point to decide which location to visit next in the route.

For the algorithm, we used a simple BFS-based approach on top of this scoring. It wasn't a perfect solution to the full vehicle routing problem, but under hackathon time pressure, a clear heuristic plus a straightforward search was good enough to find fast routes and keep us competitive on the leaderboard.

This was in 2016, when AI was nowhere to be found in our toolbox. We coded everything by hand, with no tests, and had to make it runnable within a few hours and submit it to an API that powered a real-time leaderboard. It felt like a game to us, watching the leaderboard update with our names and our rivals’. In the end, the top 10 submissions were all ours. We successfully delivered all the goods using the fastest routes.

We won the first prize. The challenge was fun, and my teammate and I had a great bonding experience. We weren’t the smartest individuals, but together we achieved something much bigger than what either of us could have done alone.

I learned that day that when you create a good environment where people feel challenged but also safe and have fun doing their work, they will perform at their best.

Here was the certificate

On the leaderboard, the score was a penalty value, so lower was better. That’s why the teams with a score of 0 ranked above the others with higher numbers.

vhit was the name of our school, We named the team vhit to honor our school of Vietnam - Korea University of Information and Communication Technology that we all graduated in the same year of 2012.

I only had this blurry picture of the band, the guy on the left is Huỳnh Minh Tuấn, the guy on the right is Phùng Đông Hưng.