Documents/Program submission for the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014 final phase

Qualified 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 2014 final material".

For our evaluation scripts, the participants are asked to provide an executable called challengeSNCF, with the following syntax: executable -t time_limit -p instance_directory -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_directory to load the data associated with the instance . The input files will be in ./instance_directory
  • -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 10 minutes by instance on an Intel Core i3-3220 3.30Mhz with 8Go RAM on a linux Suse 11 64 bits or Win7 64 bits.

The machine will have a graphic card AMD FirePro V4900.

The global score of team T is the sum of its scores over the instances B U X. For each instance I, if the program of T is still running at the time limit or if the output solution is infeasible, then the score of T on I is equal to the score of the empty solution file. Notice in particular that the empty solution file is always feasible for each instance in B U X.