  This paper reports on the first international competition on AI for the
traveling salesman problem (TSP) at the International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence 2021 (IJCAI-21). The TSP is one of the classical
combinatorial optimization problems, with many variants inspired by real-world
applications. This first competition asked the participants to develop
algorithms to solve a time-dependent orienteering problem with stochastic
weights and time windows (TD-OPSWTW). It focused on two types of learning
approaches: surrogate-based optimization and deep reinforcement learning. In
this paper, we describe the problem, the setup of the competition, the winning
methods, and give an overview of the results. The winning methods described in
this work have advanced the state-of-the-art in using AI for stochastic routing
problems. Overall, by organizing this competition we have introduced routing
problems as an interesting problem setting for AI researchers. The simulator of
the problem has been made open-source and can be used by other researchers as a
benchmark for new AI methods.
