Synergistic Equilibrium

Tourism and environmental sustainability are a zero-sum game—or so the standard models assume. MCM/ICM 2025 (Problem B) challenged us to find synergies. We built a three-dimensional coupled model linking tourist flow, environmental quality, and social satisfaction through system dynamics, then optimized with NSGA-III to find the Pareto frontier.

Achieved 8.3% tourist prediction error with R²>0.5 on the coupled model. PCA-KMeans clustering identified distinct destination archetypes with different optimal strategies. Competed against 28,000+ teams globally—Honorable Mention.