FICO® Xpress Solver used by Modeling and Optimization group at Amazon to perform important research work on improving the speed and efficiency of massive delivery networks

FICO (NYSE: FICO): Global analytics software leader FICO today announced that a research team from Amazon was honored with a distinction in the 2024 FICO® Xpress Best Paper Award competition, acknowledging their outstanding research. Their academic paper presents research on how to optimize an extremely large delivery network, using FICO® Xpress Solver to perform the vast calculations required, involving hundreds of millions of variables.

The paper has been published in the renowned European Journal of Operational Research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377221723000371

More information: https://community.fico.com/s/blog-post/a5QQi000002rzU1MAI/fico5206

The growth in online retailing has created the need for extremely large, extremely efficient delivery networks that operate around the clock. The Amazon team studied the design of a low-cost fulfilment network that allows for the fast shipping of packages between origins (e.g., warehouses) and destinations (e.g., customer locations).

Service Network Design problems, as they are known, are considered very hard to solve efficiently. Existing research was mostly restricted to cases with a few hundred origins, destinations and commodities. Yet, using the powerful FICO® Xpress Solver, the Amazon team developed a sophisticated heuristic approach that solves for thousands of origins and destinations, and more than 100,000 commodities.

“This kind of problem involves half a billion variables and constraints, and the Amazon team did breakthrough work in this area at this scale,” said Dr. Timo Berthold, director of Mixed-Integer Optimization at FICO who co-manages the contest. “Their work builds on resource-task networks, a modelling framework that is widely used in chemical engineering process design. The Amazon team developed a mixed-integer programming model that is solved by FICO Xpress and has wide applicability for extremely large computational problems with network flow underpinnings.”

“The potent API of Xpress enabled us to tailor our algorithms precisely to our needs, and the powerful optimization engine of FICO Xpress Solver was indispensable in achieving our results,” said Cristiana L. Lara of Amazon’s Modeling and Optimization group, who led the Amazon research team. “Our work has direct application to businesses like ours that rely on massive distribution networks.”

In 2022, the FICO® Xpress Best Paper Award was introduced to acknowledge exceptional research in Mathematical Optimization, Operations Research and related fields. Nominations for the 2025 award are due by February 14.

Recognized as one of the fastest and most powerful optimization solvers, FICO® Xpress Solver gives business users, data scientists and researchers greater power and flexibility when solving complex problems in supply chain optimization, energy, pricing and many other applications.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 80 countries do everything from protecting 4 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency. Learn more at www.fico.com.

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