Document submission for the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2012 Qualification phase

Registered participants shall send (before the deadline of the final stage) the following material:

  • Team Id (provided upon registration) and category,
  • An extended abstract (5 pages) of the proposed method including the characteristics of the computer used,
  • A table giving the results and CPU times obtained on each instance,
  • the solution files of each instance of set B,
  • the program (see the subject).

All these documents shall be sent via email as a compressed archive to organisers with the subject " ROADEF/EURO challenge 2012 qualification material".

For our evaluation scripts, the participants are asked to provide an executable called machineReassignment, with the following syntax: executable -t time_limit -p instance_filename -i original_solution_filename -o new_solution_filename -name -s seed

  • -t time_limit to stop the program execution after time_limit seconds (caution: this is "real time", not cputime). The test machine will be totally dedicated and the tests will be done sequentially, therefore all the teams will have the same amount of CPU power.
  • -p instance_filename to load the data associated with the instance instance_filename . The input file will be ./instance_filename
  • -i original_solution_filename to designate the file with the reference solution.
  • -o new_solution_filename to designate the result file.
  • -name to return the identifier of the team that is the author of the executable (if it is the only option the executable returns the team identifier and quits). The team identifier will be given to every team upon registration.
  • -s seed force program with random to be deterministic
  • Using the seed value passed as a parameter to the executable program is under the responsibility of participants to support the repeatability of experiments/evaluations, particularly, if their solution methods are based on probabilistic frameworks or components

    Programs will be evaluate only ONCE, never TWICE. If variability occur, the organisers can not be responsible from potential bad behaviour on this single run

The maximum execution time will be fixed to 5 minutes by instance on a core2duo E8500 3.16Mhz with 4Go RAM on debian 64 or Win7 64 bits.

All programs respecting the above conditions will be evaluated through the sum of Score() over all instances. Given an instance I, the best solution among competitors is B and the original reference solution R
Score(I) = ( overallCost(I) - overallCost(B) ) / overallCost(R)

If an executable fails to find a feasible solution or violate some constraints, we consider no improvments from the original reference solutin, so overallCost(I)=overallCost(R).