The competition challenge was based on a logistic planning problem proposed by Airbus. It dealt with the storage and management of cargo transported by Airbus Beluga XL aircrafts. Those bring aircraft parts that need to be pushed to – or pulled from – a rack system that works as a bidirectional multi queue system.

Aircraft parts are held on jigs, which can slide and be stored on the racks. Trailers are used as special moving racks to transfer the jigs between the Beluga and the fixed racks. When the aircraft parts are sent to the production lines, they transit to hangars where cranes remove the parts from the jigs. The parts are then sent to production and the jigs return empty to the rack system.

The racks can contain several jigs in sequence, but only the jigs which are at the edges of the racks (either factory side or Beluga side) can be pulled out. This might require swapping jigs located at the rack edges to other racks in order to free the pass to jigs which are strictly inside the racks.

When the Beluga lands at the production site, 2 high-level tasks must be performed:

● unloading the parts (held on jigs) and storing them in the rack system;
● unstoring empty jigs from the rack system and loading them into the Beluga.

Between two Beluga flights, 3 high-level tasks must be considered:

● unstoring parts held on jigs from the rack system and sending them to the production lines via the craning hangars;
● sending back empty jigs from the craning hangars to the rack system;
● [optionally] swapping the jigs which are at the edges of the racks (either factory side or Beluga side) from one rack to another, in order to free the pass to jigs which are strictly inside the racks.