This repo is for the Kaggle competition https://www.kaggle.com/c/santa-workshop-tour-2019 A number of ideas were tried for this competition. With the best results from using MIP (Mixed-Integer Programming) Solvers. Two solvers that I attemped to use were IBM's CPLEX and Google's OR-Tools.

My final results were 172 place out of 1620. This resulted in a top 10% finish. The final solution value was 69584. However, running the project I was able to find the optimal solution with the project

This result was achieved using IBM's CPLEX, running on a Google Compute server.

• Santa is opening his workshop for 100 days for Christmas.
• 5000 families of varying sizes would like to visit santa's workshop
• Each family has a preference on the day they would like to visit the workshop
• There is a cost to not giving a family their top pick so the goal is to try give a familiy one of the best picks
• There is also a cost to having a large difference in people one day compared to the next
• The final constrait is that there must be between 125 and 300 people for every day that the workshop is open

cplex - Code to run the model with IBM's CPLEX. A full version of CPLEX is required for this. docloud - Without a full version of CPLEX, it is possible to get a trial of IBM's docloud. This is a server that can run CPLEX models on 10 core 60 GB machines. However, the trial version will only allow a model to last 1 hour of compute time. It did not successfully work due to this limitation. eda - Any exploritory work for the project input - data provided by kaggle ortools - Implementations using Google's OR-Tools. One model using their CBC solver and another using their CP solver reinforement-learning - An attempted implementation was to turn this problem into a reinforement learning problem. Deep Q and Double Deep Q were used to create an implemention submissions - Saved submissions during the work.

Due to the complexity of the problem, a higher powered computer than what I own was required. Therefore Google Compute was used. This project was run over a few days on a computer with 8vCPUs and 52 GB of memory