ITC 2021: International Timetabling Competition on Sports Timetabling

Building on the success of the earlier timetabling competitions, the International Timetabling Competition 2021 aims to motivate further research on automated sports timetabling and to learn from these efforts. In order to participate in the competition, send a mail to itc2021 at ugent dot be.

The prizes for the ITC 2021 competition are as follows (see also rules).

Winner first milestone:

• Free registration for MathSport International 2021 (Reading, UK)

Top three overall:

• Winner: 1,000EUR + free registration for PATAT 2021 (Bruges, Belgium)
• Runner-up: 500EUR + discount on registration for PATAT 2021
• Third: 250EUR + discount on registration for PATAT 2021

These prizes are kindly sponsored by the EURO working group on Automated Timetabling (EWG PATAT) and the EURO working group on OR in Sports (EWG OR In Sports)).

The problem instances consist of constructing a time-constrained double round-robin tournament with 16 to 20 teams while respecting some hard constraints and minimizing the penalties from violated soft constraints. Three groups of problem instances will be published during the competition (early, middle, late). While the order of the competitors will be based on all the published data instances, the instances released later in the competition have a much higher weight in the final ranking. See the rules for more information.

You are invited to send solutions to itc2021 at ugent dot be. Our aim is to answer your mail within a week. To avoid mistakes, please follow these rules:

• Only submit solutions in the appropriate XML files format, any other format will not be accepted! Note that an interactive XML solution file writer is at your disposal here.
• Run the online validator on the XML files to check that the results are as expected.
• If you submit more than two XML files at the same time, please bundle them in a single zip file.

The ITC2021 competition is now officially over. We would like to explicitly thank all 13 teams that have participated in the competition. We are pleased to announce the final ranking of the 6 finalists.

• 1st place (596 points)
  Team UoS consisting of Toni Martínez-Sykora, Chris Potts, and Carlos Lamas-Fernández.
  University of Southampton
  Team UoS wins 1,000EUR and a free registration for PATAT 2022 (Bruges, Belgium)!
• 2nd place (424 points)
  Team Udine consisting of Roberto Maria Rosati, Matteo Petris, Luca Di Gaspero, and Andrea Schaerf.
  University of Udine
  Team Udine wins 500EUR and a discount on registration PATAT 2022 (Bruges, Belgium)!
• 3rd place (386 points)
  Team Saturn consisting of Sumin Daniil, and Rodin Ivan.
  HSE University
  Team Saturn wins 250EUR and a discount on registration PATAT 2022 (Bruges, Belgium)!
• 4th place (243 points)
  Team GOAL consisting of George H. G. Fonseca, and Túlio A. M. Toffolo.
  Group of Optimization and ALgorithms from Federal University of Ouro Preto
• 5th place (236 points)
  Team MODAL consisting of Thorsten Koch, Timo Berthold, and Yuji Shinano.
  Research Campus MODAL, Zuse Institute Berlin
• 6th place (224 points)
  Team TU/e consisting of Jasper van Doornmalen, Roel Lambers, Frits Spieksma, and Christopher Hojny.
  Eindhoven University of Technology

For more details, please refer to the award ceremony which was held at the 8th Mathsport International Conference on 24-25 June 2021 hosted by the University of Reading.

We are pleased to announce the top three of the first milestone.

• 1st place (138 points)
  Team UoS consisting of Toni Martínez-Sykora, Chris Potts, and Carlos Lamas-Fernández.
  Team UoS wins a free registration for MathSport International 2021 (Reading, UK)!
• 2nd place (96 points)
  Team Udine consisting of Roberto Maria Rosati, Matteo Petris, Luca Di Gaspero, and Andrea Schaerf.
• 3rd place (57 points)
  Team TUE consisting of Jasper van Doornmalen, Roel Lambers, Frits Spieksma, and Christopher Hojny.

The points have been awarded using the scoring rules 12-15. For each problem instance, the objective value of the best submitted solution can be found under the Instaces tab.
Please note that the participation in the first milestone was completely voluntary and has no impact on the final ranking of participants. For the final ordering, points are only awarded based on the final submission for each early, middle, and late instance uploaded by April 30, 2021. The middle problem instances will be released by the end of this week, and the late problem instances will be released middle April.

We will release the instances in three groups: early, middle, and late instances. The early group of instances are already on our website. The middle group of instances will be released in February 2021, and the late instances will follow half April 2021. There is only one deadline for all problem instances which is end of April 2021. After this deadline, we will announce the finalists. First results will be announced at the MathSport International 2021 conference in June 2021. The winners of the competition will be announced at the PATAT 2021 conference in August 2021. There is also the opportunity to submit intermediate results for the early instances (first milestone). Half January 2021, we will make a ranking of the intermediate results. Although not obligatory, it is strongly advised to submit intermediate results since this allows to have a first idea of how your methods compare to what other participants have. A prize is awarded to the winners of the first milestone.