Hackathon Hands Students a Global Supply Chain in Crisis

Global cargo rarely moves on schedule. During the recent Global Freight Frenzy, an intensive hackathon hosted in the Accelerate Makerspace, Wentworth Institute of Technology students built software to keep freight moving anyway. 

Run in partnership with logistics technology venture LOGIC, the event pushed teams to address real-world constraints across intermodal transportation networks. Central to the problem-solving activities was the fact that the global supply chain remains heavily fragmented. 

"Right now the world's very different. The hubs and the ports and all of it, they're not connected," said Kaden Landry '28, an Applied Artificial Intelligence student in the School of Computing & Data Science. "That's the one issue that they're trying to solve. And that's why we're here, we're being challenged to solve it in a simulation." 

Orchestration vs. Execution 
 

The hackathon required participants to bridge the gap between "orchestration systems," which decide what needs to be done, and "execution systems," such as automated warehouse robotics. 

Michael Santora '05, founder and CEO of LOGIC and a Wentworth trustee, said the core challenge is linking those systems across different modes of transit. 

"The real centerpiece of the supply chain is intermodal movements," Santora said. "So what our system does is coordinates all of the different modes of transportation, which is going to become more and more important as those modes of transportation become automated." 

Students were thrown constant curveballs designed to mirror real industry crises, including late trains, broken trucks, and vessels that simply never arrived. The winning team recovered fastest from these injected incidents. 

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Pioneering AI and Systems Engineering 

The event served as a real-time showcase of the specialized talent emerging from the School of Computing & Data Science. With students like Landry pursuing forward-looking degrees, the hackathon highlighted how the Wentworth curriculum has evolved to meet complex, modern demands.  

By dropping students into the center of a live, unscripted industry problem, the event highlighted the university's capacity for producing versatile problem-solvers who can view problems holistically. 

"We chose Wentworth because we knew Wentworth had the ability to produce these multifaceted engineers that would get the entire problem," Santora added. "It's not just the software solution that they were working on in the hackathon, but it was also thinking about the greater challenges and applications that were going to come from what they created." 

For the students, the grueling challenge proved to be a highly rewarding community experience. 

"It was great to meet people that also go to Wentworth that similarly have an interest in this," Landry said. "It was awesome. I would totally do it again." 

Watch the Global Freight Frenzy in action at this link.