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I am looking for previous OR challenges.

My goal is :

  1. Applying my knowledge while solving problems suggested in those competitions; and/or

  2. If possible, reading solutions posted by participants.

I learned a lot about machine learning (ML) by reading solutions to Kaggle competitions. I couldn't find any similar website for OR problems. It seems that the ML hype is eating up everything.

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The Helmut Schmidt Universitat contains a list of past, ongoing, and future contests in Operations Research.

https://www.hsu-hh.de/logistik/research/challenges

For example:

  • Active challenges: ITC 2019 on finding feasible solutions for organising student rooms and times.

  • Past challenges: PACE 2018 on Steiner trees on an undirected edge-weighted graph

They are a considerable number of links to past events, though some of them have already been introduced in other answers, such as ROADEF.

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I personally like Project Euler. This website has mathematical problems that usually require programming to solve them. If you solve a problem you get access to the corresponding problem forum, in which users post their code and discuss their approaches.

Admittedly, I consider Project Euler to be more about mathematics and computer science than about Operations Research. Still, there are plenty of problems that involve optimization, or to which OR techniques can be applied.

I suggest the following problems for those with OR skills. Whether these problems are really OR is of course debatable, and the list is non-exhaustive: Problem 11, 18, 67, 68, 81, 82, 83, 84, 96, 122, 149, 185, 190, 280, 345, 392, 460, and 607.

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The French OR society has some interesting OR challenges

http://www.roadef.org/challenge/2018/en/index.php

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Google Hashcode had some optimization challenges in the past. Problem definitions and data from previous years can be found here.

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There is a competition section held during MOPTA (Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications), which is organized annually by Lehigh University. The competition is for students only and usually devoted to a practical problem and sponsored by a solver company.

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And we also have the DIMACS implementation challenges #ofcourse

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For constraint programming, there's the Minizinc Challenge.

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    $\begingroup$ And the xcsp3 challenge as well. $\endgroup$
    – Laurent Perron
    Aug 23, 2019 at 18:52
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Here is a link to INFORMS OR and analytics students team competition. You can also find the challenges for previous years and the presentations of the winner team. I believe you need to be registered in INFORMS in order to get the data.

https://connect.informs.org/oratc/home

Edit: in The Operation Research Challenge (TORCH)'s website, you can find the challenges and required data as well.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. I couldn't find how to download the data sets, there are only problems' statements and solutions' presentations. $\endgroup$
    – Antarctica
    Aug 16, 2019 at 23:43
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Simulation
The simulation-software company Simio holds an annual student competition.
Arena has one also.

Forecasting
There are the Makridakis Competitions, though they are infrequent. M-4 is just now getting finalized.

Optimization
List of active & historical competitions. (as mentioned)
Grid Optimization competition.
Black Box Optimization competition.

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Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM)

Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), an international contest for high school students and college undergraduates. It challenges teams of students to clarify, analyze, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. The contest attracts diverse students and faculty advisors from over 900 institutions around the world.

LINK - MCM

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Global Trajectory Optimization

Mission level Trajectory Optimization is also subfield of OR, although it is often only worked on by the aerospace industry. The Global Trajectory Optimization Competition is a competition between aerospace engineers and mathematicians world wide which work to the best solution to "nearly-impossible" problems of interplanetary trajectory design.

Since the next years workshop is hosted by the winners of the last years one, the solutions and problems are hosted at different websites. However the GTOC portal by ESA has links to all of those.

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Let me also mention the IBM Research Ponder This challenge. Not always OR oriented but I have solved 50+ of those with an OR Tool : OPL CPLEX.

The Decision Management Community also offers some OR challenges.

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