HiMCM 2014 · Problem set
A pair of operations-and-public-health problems with very different flavors. Problem A is a tightly-scoped pedestrian-flow optimization — how fast can a packed commuter train empty onto the street, and where should the stairways go? Problem B is a wide-open epidemiology problem with staged information releases, asking teams to classify a mysterious village outbreak, decide whether it is contained, and allocate limited public-health resources before writing a news-friendly summary.
| Contest dates | November 13 – November 17, 2014 (5-day window) [illustrative] |
| Participation | ~600 teams, primarily United States and China [illustrative] |
| Problem A | Unloading Commuter Trains — pedestrian egress, stair placement, throughput optimization |
| Problem B | The Next Plague? — outbreak classification, SIR-style modeling, resource allocation, public memo |
| Official results | 2014 HiMCM problems & commentary |
The two problems
Unloading Commuter Trains
A crowded commuter train pulls into a station — model the time for every passenger to exit the cars, traverse the platform, and climb the stairs to street level. Then optimize how many stairways to build, where to place them, and how the model changes when two trains arrive together.
The Next Plague?
Half of a 300-person village shows similar symptoms. Build a disease model, classify severity, decide whether the outbreak is contained, allocate medical resources, and deliver a one-page non-technical news summary.
Why this year is good practice
- Two classic archetypes. A is a discrete-event / agent-based crowd-flow problem with very clean knobs (number of cars, platform length, stairway count). B is an epidemiological compartmental-model problem with staged information — both archetypes show up repeatedly in later HiMCM years.
- Geometry vs. dynamics. A is mostly about where bottlenecks form on a 1D platform; B is mostly about when a contagion peaks and whether interventions bend the curve. Together they exercise complementary modeling muscles.
- Strong non-technical writeup. A asks for an MTA-style recommendation; B asks for a press-friendly news brief. Both reward a clean executive paragraph plus one chart the layperson can actually read.