In this competition, we will use the data format of the
RobinX project (although we will not use all its features and constraints).
We will release the competition problem instances in three groups: early, middle, and late.
While the early instances are
available on the website already, the middle group of instances will be released in February 2021 and the late group of instances will follow half February 2021.
There is only one deadline to submit solutions for all instances: end of April 2021.
The format of the problem instances is briefly explained in
the video at the home page, for more information we refer to the document below (if the document is not rendered, click
here).
RobinX makes use of XML to store problem instances and solutions.
While still being human readable, the advantage of XML over plain text-only file formats lies in the structured way of data storage (see
w3schools for an introduction to XML).
Since nearly all programming langauges provide parsers to read and write XML files (e.g.
xml.etree.ElementTree for python, and
tinyxml2 for C++), the set-up costs to work with XML files should be low.