Category Archives: Competition

Update: GECCO 2021 Industrial Challenge – Competition on Optimization of a Simulation Model for Capacity and Resource Planing Task for hospitals under special consideration of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Competition website:https://www.th-koeln.de/informatik-und-ingenieurwissenschaften/gecco-2021-industrial-challenge-call-for-participation_82086.php

Highlights of the GECCO 2021 Industrial Challenge include:

  • Interesting Problem Domain: The impact of COVID-19 on the health system is ongoing and tools to help in capacity planning are more important than ever.
  • Real-world Problems: Test your algorithms and methods, directly on real and current data.
  • Easy Access: Easily Participate through our online platform, no installations required.
  • Fair Submission Assessment: Winners are determined automatically through our online portal, fully objectively, only based on the final result quality.
  • Publication Possibilities: We are able to accept 2-page submissions for the GECCO Companion; thus, publications are possible directly through competition participation.
  • Price money:  The best solution will receive 300€, the second place 200€ and the third place 100€

Simulation models are valuable tools for resource usage estimation and capacity planning. The simulator, BaBSim.Hospital, explicitly covers difficulties for hospitals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The simulator can handle many aspects of resource planning in hospitals, such as ICU beds, ventilators or personal, while taking into consideration several cohorts as age or current health status. 
The task represents an instance of an expensive, high-dimensional computer simulation-based optimization problem. The simulations will be executed through an interface and hosted on one of our servers (similar to our last year’s challenge).

Your goal is to find an optimal parameter configuration for the BaBSim.Hospital simulator with a very limited budget of objective function evaluations. The participants will be free to apply one or multiple optimization algorithms of their choice.

Like last year, we are able to provide the opportunity for all participants to submit 2-page algorithm descriptions for the GECCO Companion. Thus, it is now possible to create publications in a similar procedure to the Late-Breaking Abstracts (LBAs) directly through competition participation!

2-Page Algorithm Description Submission Deadline: 2021-04-12 23:59
To be held as part of the 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021) organized by ACM SIGEVO (https://gecco-2021.sigevo.org).

GECCO 2021: COMPETITION ON OPTIMIZATION OF A SIMULATION MODEL FOR A CAPACITY AND RESOURCE PLANNING TASK FOR HOSPITALS UNDER SPECIAL CONSIDERATION OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Simulation models are valuable tools for resource usage estimation and capacity planning. The simulator, BaBSim.Hospital, explicitly covers difficulties for hospitals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The simulator can handle many aspects of resource planning in hospitals, such as ICU beds, ventilators or personal, while taking into consideration several cohorts as age or current health status. 
The task represents an instance of an expensive, high-dimensional computer simulation-based optimization problem. The simulations will be executed through an interface and hosted on one of our servers (similar to our last year’s challenge).

Your goal is to find an optimal parameter configuration for the BaBSim.Hospital simulator with a very limited budget of objective function evaluations. The participants will be free to apply one or multiple optimization algorithms of their choice.

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GECCO 2021 Competition on Dynamic Stacking Optimization in Uncertain Environments

Hotstorage. In this track a dynamic environment is provided that represents a simplified, but realistic stacking scenario. It is characterized by three types of stacks called Arrival, Buffer, and Handover as well as a Crane which relocates Blocks between the stacks. Image taken from https://dynstack.adaptop.at

In this competition we give you a server where you can delve into two challenging and mysterious worlds of blocks and stacks. The hero in these worlds are robotic cranes that are fearlessly stacking and delivering blocks. Did you ever wish to take control of such a robot solving a herculean task? Well, now is your chance! Our cranes want to do a good job and therefore rely on YOUR optimization skills! They wait for you to tell it which blocks to pick up and where to drop them off so that the continuing stream of incoming blocks is dealt with most effortlessly. Competition webpage: https://dynstack.adaptop.at

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