In 2024–2025, as part of the European project TUPLES – Trustworthy AI, the European aerospace leader AIRBUS partnered with Optit to design and manage a competition on a logistics planning problem, focused on the storage and load planning of cargo for the Airbus Beluga XL.
These cargo aircraft require a complex load movement, both inbound and outbound, managed through a bidirectional, multi-queue rack system. From this complexity arose the need to launch a competition to assess different approaches proposed by the scientific community across three key areas:
deterministic and probabilistic scenarios, to optimise load plans under fixed or uncertain conditions linked to arrivals and departures;
explainability, to clarify infeasibility issues and propose alternative solutions.
To address this challenge, Optit developed a Competition Platform designed to manage complex competitions and accurately replicate real-world industrial cases. The platform enables the simulation of realistic and complex industrial scenarios, ensuring repeatable, traceable and reliable assessments, both in terms of performance and solution quality.
Key features of the Competition Platform include:
iterative evaluations using algorithms under probabilistic conditions;
integrated GenAI with LLM available to participants for explainability challenges;
isolated, reproducible executions automatically orchestrated by the Optit platform, designed to ensure robustness and reliability.
The impact was significant for both participants and organisers: a real and high-level testbed for researchers and professionals in the fields of decision-making and Trustworthy AI. Participants engaged with real industrial use cases, working alongside experts and high-profile researchers, while the organisers benefited from an adaptive and scalable platform that simplified the management and evaluation of the challenge throughout its entire lifecycle.Our work provided AIRBUS with a competition platform capable of managing challenges of varying complexity, integrating heterogeneous and innovative solution approaches, and accelerating their adoption.
