Tuesday, January 15, 2019

[DMANET] News about ITC 2019: International Timetabling Competition

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

* * New participants are welcome!*
o final submission: November 18, 2019
* *1st milestone submission is coming soon*
o February 1, 2019
o optional submission: not needed for final submission and ordering
* *Early data sets available*
o 10 real-world instances available now
o see characteristics at https://www.itc2019.org/early-instances
* *New prizes to winners of late instances*
o provided by ORTEC
* *New prize to the best open source solver *
o provided by Apereo Foundation
o see more details at https://www.itc2019.org/rules#open-source
* Video about University Course Timetabling and ITC 2019
o http://bit.ly/itc2019-video
* Current status: 72 registered users from 31 countries

***NEW 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
* 11 institutions from six continents
* Early, middle and late instances, around 8-10 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

*MID-COMPETITION STANDINGS*

* Two milestones during the competition
* Quality of the best solutions published
* 300, 200, 100 EUR for the top three solvers
* Submission for milestones is optional, not counted in the final
ordering.

***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

*
February 1, 2019 1st milestone submission
June 1, 2019
2nd milestone submission
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 LLC
* Hana Rudova, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
* Zuzana Mullerova, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University,
UniTime LLC

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


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