GECCO 2020 Competition on OCP and USCP - Call for participation

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to take part in the 1st Competition on the Optimal Camera Placement Problem (OCP) and the Unicost Set Covering Problem (USCP) that will be part of the next Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2020, at Cancun, Mexico, 8-12 July 2020).

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

If an area is defined as a set of three-dimensional sample points to be covered, and if camera configurations are sampled into so-called candidates each with a given set of position and orientation coordinates, then the optimal camera placement problem (OCP) comes down to select the smallest subset of candidates which covers all the samples.

The OCP is structurally identical to the unicost set covering problem (USCP), which is one of Karp’s well-known NP-hard problems: given a set of elements I (rows) to be covered, and a collection of sets J (columns) such that the union of all sets in J is I, find the smallest subset of J which covers I.

The main goal of this competition is to encourage innovative research works by proposing to solve challenging OCP problem instances stated as USCP.

The contest gathers 69 OCP problem instances: 32 of them are academic problems (various sizes and discretizations of an empty room modeled by a rectangular cuboid with cameras on the ceiling), and 37 of them are real-world problems (various sizes and discretizations of urban areas with cameras on the walls of the buildings).

Details of the competition (problem instances, data formats, competition tracks, rules for registration, submission and evaluation,...) are available at :
http://www.mage.fst.uha.fr/brevilliers/gecco-2020-ocp-uscp-competition/

PUBLICATION:

In addition to their competition entries, participants will have the opportunity to submit a short description of their algorithm for publication in the GECCO Companion (2-page contribution).

IMPORTANT DATES :

March 20, 2020 : Early competition registration deadline (needed for GECCO Companion submissions)
April 3, 2020 : Submission deadline for GECCO Companion abstracts
April 17, 2020 : Notification of acceptance for GECCO Companion abstracts
May 22, 2020 : Late competition registration deadline
June 5, 2020 : End of the competition, i.e. solution submission deadline
July 8-12, 2020 : GECCO conference, and announcement of the competition results


Please feel free to forward this announcement to any colleagues who may be interested in this optimization competition.

We are looking forward to your contributions and welcome questions and comments.


The organizing committee:

Mathieu Brévilliers, Université de Haute-Alsace, France
Julien Kritter, Université de Haute-Alsace, France
Julien Lepagnot, Université de Haute-Alsace, France
Lhassane Idoumghar, Université de Haute-Alsace, France