LG CNS said on the 26th that it held the awards ceremony for the country's only optimization competition, "Optimization Grand Challenge 2025," wrapping up roughly four months of events.
LG CNS, leading the field of "mathematical optimization," the technological foundation for future "game-changer" industries such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, and robotics, held the optimization competition for the second straight year to broaden the industry's base. Mathematical optimization is a technology that calculates every possible case within limited resources and constraints to find the best alternative that delivers maximum efficiency. The event was co-hosted by LG CNS and the Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers.
From May to September, a total of 343 teams (676 people) competed, with participation from leading universities in Korea and abroad, including ▲Seoul National University ▲KAIST ▲POSTECH ▲Imperial College London in the United Kingdom ▲Eindhoven University of Technology, and from corporations such as ▲LG Display ▲Samsung Electronics ▲Hyundai Motor ▲KT.
The theme was to find the most efficient vehicle loading plan when exporting automobiles to major overseas markets such as the United States and Europe by ship. In particular, because different vehicles have to be loaded and unloaded at each port of call, the task was to find the optimal rearrangement structure within the ship's limited space. The crux of the evaluation was to build an optimization algorithm that minimizes the expense incurred in the overall loading and unloading process within a limited time. To ensure fairness, the judging panel scored the algorithms in real time upon submission and reflected the results on a leaderboard visible to all participants.
The grand prize went to TryAgain, a graduate student team from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University. LG CNS awarded prize money to the 10 teams that made the finals of the Optimization Grand Challenge 2025. Six teams that won the grand prize, top excellence prizes, and excellence prizes were granted an exemption from document screening for LG CNS job applications for the next three years. LG CNS plans to open source all algorithm code submitted by participating teams.
LG CNS said it has led technological advances in the domestic mathematical optimization field and expanded applications across diverse industries. Recently, it has helped improve work efficiency for corporate clients through efforts such as ▲optimizing material loading and crane operation schedules for steel companies ▲optimizing operation and charging for guide, patrol, and self check-in robots at airports ▲optimizing painting work plans for shipbuilding companies. The Optimization Consulting Office, which oversees the optimization business, performs end-to-end tasks from data analysis to mathematical optimization and strategy consulting, and has the largest number of optimization experts with master's and doctoral degrees in Korea.
Kim Tae-hoon, executive vice president and head of the AI Cloud Business Division at LG CNS, said, "Drawing optimal efficiency with corporations' limited resources is highly complex and difficult, but it can be solved with 'mathematical optimization,'" and added, "LG CNS will continue to expand the competition to strengthen leadership in the field of mathematical optimization."