Thursday, September 19, 2019

[DMANET] Middle instances from ITC 2019 International Timetabling Competition

------------------------------------------------------------------------
ITC 2019: International Timetabling competitionhttps://www.itc2019.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
NEWS*

* *Middle instances are published!*
o 10 other real-world instances available now
o see characteristics at https://www.itc2019.org/middle-instances
* *Current status*
o winners for two milestones announced with the total costs
<https://www.itc2019.org/#results> of the best solution for
each of the early instances
<https://www.itc2019.org/early-instances>
o 174 registered users from 51 countries
o 18 users successfully verified their solutions
* *What next?*
o late instances to be published on November 8
o final submission by November 18
o papers welcomed for the special track about the competition
at PATAT <http://www.patatconference.org> 2020: open to any
work related to the competition problems

------------------------------------------------------------------------

***UNIVERSITY COURSE TIMETABLING COMPETITION*

* Assignment of times and rooms to events
* Student sectioning based on course demands
* Optimization by minimizing penalties of
o time and room assignments,
o violated soft constraints,
o student conflicts
* Course structure for student sectioning
* Rooms with travel times and unavailabilities
* Events not meeting every week

***RICH REAL-WORLD DATA INSTANCES*

* Diverse characteristics
* 10 institutions from five continents
* Early, middle and late instances, 10 instances each
* Data collected from the UniTime educational scheduling system

***NO TIME OR TECHNOLOGY LIMITATIONS*

* Commercial solvers allowed
* Looking for the best solutions
* Solution validator as a web service

*WINNERS*

* Five finalists, prices for the first three
o 1000, 500, 250 EUR
* Free PATAT 2020 registrations
* Awards supported by
o PATAT conference
o EWG PATAT
* Award for the best open source solver
o 500 USD
o Award provided by Apereo Foundation
* Awards for winners of late instances
o 150 EUR per instance
o Awards provided by ORTEC
* Points awarded for each instance
* More points for later instances

***PATAT 2020 CONFERENCE*

* A special track about the competition
* Winners announced
* Journal special issue

***IMPORTANT DATES

*
September 18, 2019 Middle instances published
November 8, 2019 Late instances published
November 18, 2019 Final submission
January 1, 2020 Open source solvers publication
January 15, 2020
Finalists published
February-March, 2020 PATAT 2020 submissions
August, 2020 Winners announced at PATAT 2020
Autumn, 2020 Journal special issue

*
**AFTER THE COMPETITION*

* The ITC 2019 website remains available
* Tracking the best-known solutions and related papers

*****SPONSORS*

* Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
(PATAT)
* ORTEC: optimization software and analytics solutions
* Apereo Foundation: supporting open-source software for higher
education
* EURO working group on Automated Timetabling (EWG PATAT)
* UniTime educational scheduling system
* Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

***ORGANIZERS*

* Tomas Muller, Purdue University, UniTime, s.r.o.
* Hana Rudova, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
* Zuzana Mullerova, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University,
UniTime, s.r.o.

See https://www.itc2019.org for more details.



**********************************************************
*
* Contributions to be spread via DMANET are submitted to
*
* DMANET@zpr.uni-koeln.de
*
* Replies to a message carried on DMANET should NOT be
* addressed to DMANET but to the original sender. The
* original sender, however, is invited to prepare an
* update of the replies received and to communicate it
* via DMANET.
*
* DISCRETE MATHEMATICS AND ALGORITHMS NETWORK (DMANET)
* http://www.zaik.uni-koeln.de/AFS/publications/dmanet/
*
**********************************************************