Beluga™ Challenge: The Contribution of SIA AI

This is the second article dedicated to the Beluga Challenge awardees.

Léna Aix, Benoît Bompol, and Jean Jodeau are members of the Research and Development team at SIA AI, part of Sia Partners, an international consulting firm founded 26 years ago and recognized for its expertise in strategy, digital transformation, and AI-driven solutions.

The theme of the competition — solving a real, high-stakes industrial logistics problem — motivated the team to take part. Their commitment was intense and their approach rigorous. While their solution was not among the official winners, the TUPLES judging committee decided to assign a Special Prize to acknowledge both the originality of their contribution and the remarkable effort behind it.

Tackling the Challenge

The Beluga Challenge was centered on a logistics planning problem proposed by Airbus: the storage and management of cargo transported by Beluga XL aircraft. Participants faced two scalability challenges:

Deterministic challenge: designing a sequence of actions ensuring that (1) all incoming parts are unloaded and stored in the correct order, (2) all required parts are delivered to production in sequence, and (3) all empty jigs are prepared for outgoing Beluga flights.

Probabilistic challenge: addressing uncertainty in flight arrivals, which alters the availability of jigs. Here, the goal was to design a policy (a state-to-action mapping) that performs reliably under variable conditions.

To foster real-world adoption, the competition also included an Explainability Challenge, asking participants to make solutions interpretable — a key requirement for building trust among expert human planners.

SIA AI’s Approach

The SIA AI team addressed this highly combinatorial problem through pure Operations Research methods, developing a solution that combined elegance and technical depth. Their heuristic construction algorithm integrated four main features:

🔹 A taboo list to avoid undoing recent actions
🔹 Customized scores to prioritize the most promising actions
🔹 A rollback mechanism to escape potential dead ends
🔹 A moving horizon method to anticipate future events

This method enabled them to deliver high-quality solutions within the constraints of the challenge, highlighting both ingenuity and adaptability.

A Broader Commitment

SIA AI counts more than 300 AI experts worldwide, supported by a dedicated team of 30 Operations Research specialists. This group is deeply committed to tackling optimization challenges across industries, working closely with engineering teams to address problems along the entire value chain.

Their participation in the Beluga Challenge, and the recognition they received, reflects the team’s ability to apply research-driven methods to highly complex industrial problems — an approach that embodies the spirit of innovation at the core of TUPLES.