Document submission for the ROADEF 2009 challenge and evaluation of results

Participants shall send (before the deadline of the current stage) the following documents:

  • A team information summary indicating names, first names, status (student, professor, etc.), affiliations, emails of the team members and the selected category (junior or senior)
  • an extended abstract (about 5 pages) describing the proposed method;
  • A table giving the results obtained on each instance.

In addition, the solution files of each instance shall be provided, as well as the corresponding program (see the subject).

All these documents shall be sent via email as a compressed archive to with the subject " ROADEF 2009 challenge result documents".

The programs provided by the participants will be evaluated on the target computer at Amadeus (processor AMD Turion64x2 and 2 Gb RAM). The supported OS are Windows XP (32 bit) and Linux (64 bit). Parallel computing is not allowed.

Each program must provide a result on the target computer for each instance. Any program not respecting this condition will be eliminated. The program will be run with the following command : prog_name -t cpu -i instance_name, where cpu indicates the maximum allowed running time in seconds and instance_name refers to the instance file name.

The maximum running time is fixed to 10 minutes for the evaluation. Programs not returning a solution in time will be eliminated.

All programs respecting the above conditions will be evaluated through the average normalized score over all instances. The score is given by the objective function value obtained by the program normalized by the best objective value obtained by all the programs.

In case of tie, the programs will be evaluated through successive rounds. Each round consists in comparing the programs with a smaller allowed time.

Note on commercial solvers

The usage of the following commercial solvers is allowed

  • Ilog Cplex 11.x,
  • Ilog CP Optimizer 1.x,
  • Dash Optimization Xpress-MP release 2007B,
  • Artelys Kalis 2007B.

Dash Optimization Xpress-MP and Artelys Kalis temporary licences available

Dash Optimization, part of Fair Isaac, and Artelys will provide (upon demand) each participating team with an Xpress-MP "Academic Research with CP" license and one Artelys Kalis C++ license. The license will expire on january 5 2009 and will be valid for a single computer. An email support will be provided to a single user that shall be identified with the query form.

If you which to obtain a license, first registrate to the challenge and then send an e-mail to with subject "ROADEF 2009 Challenge Xpress/Kalis license query" and precising

  • a single contact for email support (name, email and team),
  • the computer characteristics (mac address obtained via ipconfig/all and xphostid provided by the executable file downloadable through this link).

Licences will be provided on the earliest date following the query plus five days among March 20 2008, April 20 2008 and May 20 2008

ILOG temporary licences available

ILOG, an IBM company, will provide (upon demand) each participating team with one ILOG Cplex 11.x license, one CP Optimizer 1.x license and one ILOG OPL Development Studio license for a single PC. An email support will be provided to a single user that shall be identified with the query form.

If you which to obtain a license, first registrate to the challenge and then send an e-mail to with subject "ROADEF 2009 Challenge CPLEX/CP Optimizer/OPL license query" and precising a single contact for email support (name, email and team)

Ateji Optimj temporary licences available

Ateji will provide (upon demand) each participating team with an Optimj licence for the solver of the team's choice.

If you which to obtain a license, first registrate to the challenge and then send an e-mail to