Train Schedule Optimisation Challenge
Challenge Rules
The following rules have to be observed by all participants:
- participants are allowed at most 5 submissions per day
- when evaluation individual solutions directly via the REST-API, a limit of one REST-call per minute shall be observed
- In order to be eligible for prizes
- a participant must release their solution unter the MIT License and make it available to the organizers. We encourage all participants to open-source their code!
- the solutions must be found by the participants’ solver in no more than 15 minutes per problem instance. The resource limits are: 32 CPU cores, 256 GB of RAM. You may use GPUs if desired. If you want to use more exotic hardware, please get in touch with us and we will let you know if your desired setup would still qualify for the awards.
Before awarding prizes, the organizers reserve the right to verify these limits by running your solver on the crowdAI cluster - The results achieved by the solver must be reproducible. If there are randomized portions of your approach, be sure to include seeds to make the runs repeatable.
- The solver must be generic enough that it is able to handle problem instances that are similar to the nine published problem instances. Custom tuning of the solver to the nine published instances is allowed, but must be within reasonable limits. For example, (hyper)parameter-tuning of an algorithm based on the nine instances is ok. Reading in solutions, or partial solutions, to the problem instances as part of the “algorithm” is not ok.
- Sample solutions by Admins and Organizers can serve as baselines/benchmarks. However, your solutions must not be based on those. Your solutions must be produced from the problem instances by your code.
- It is in principle allowed to use commercial solving engines (such as e.g. CPLEX/Gurobi for a Mixed Integer Approach) to attack the problem. However, please contact us if you intend to do that, so we can confirm that the product is accepted for this challenge.
- In case of conflicts, the decision of the Organizers will be final and binding.
- Organizers reserve the right to make changes to the rules and timeline.
- Violation of the rules or other unfair activity may result in disqualification.