PACE 2024 - Submission requirements

Registration

If you plan to participate in the challenge, please register your team as follows:

1. Register an account for your team at optil.io.
2. Submit your solution via optil.io.

Source Code Requirements

All submissions have to be published with the following requirements:

1. The source code must be available in a repository (e.g., Bitbucket, GitHub, Gitlab).
2. The project must be publicly visible by June 10th, 2024 (AoE).
3. The submission has to have an open source licence (e.g., GPL, MIT, or public domain).
4. The repository has to contain a release with the name pace-2024.
5. The release must be placed in a digital library (e.g., Zenodo) and has to be equipped with a DOI.

The repository must contain the following files:

• a LICENSE.md or LICENSE.txt file at the root that contains the used license.
• a README.md or README.txt file at the root that contains:
  • a brief description of the submission;
  • detailed description on how to build and run the solver;
  • requirements on external libraries (if any);
• the solver description as PDF.

Solver Description Requirements

Each solver has to be shipped with a brief solver description in PDF. The document:

• has to be set with the LIPIcs LaTeX style;
• should briefly describe the used techniques and references to the original publications. The description can have at most 3 pages including title page and excluding references.
• Use as paper title your login name from optil.io;
• Place your login name from optil.io, the name of your solver and a reference to the public source code repository in the paper.

Build Tool Requirements

While we do not require the use of a specific building tool, we highly encourage to use one, e.g., cmake, cargo, etc. This allows other researchers to later use your code and improve upon your solver.

Library Requirements

We allow a limited use of external open source dependencies, preferably with source code included in the submission. If you need to install software on the target platform, please contact the organizers in advance, and we will ask the optil.io team if it is possible.

Sequential Requirement

Only sequential algorithms are permitted. Submissions that actively use parallelism will be disqualified. Non-active parallelism such as Java’s garbage collector are, however, allowed. If you are unsure whether some subroutine falls under this rule, it probably does not. Please contact the organizers in advance, if you have questions.

Submission Process

Solvers have to be submitted via optil.io and Google Drive as follows:

1. Submit the solver via optil.io, please refer to their help page.
2. Create a release in the repository of the solver (name: pace-2024).
3. Make the repository publicly visible until June 10th, 2024 (AoE).
4. Place the source code of the solver in a digital library (e.g., Zenodo) and generate a DOI.
5. Submit the link to the public repository containing your release via Google Form until June 9th, 2024 (AoE).
6. Submit the solver description via Google Form and use the DOI to refer to the solver and include a reference to the public source code repository until June 23rd, 2024 (AoE).

Student Submissions

A student is someone who is not and has not been enrolled in a PhD program before the submission deadline. A submission is eligible for a Student Submission Award if either all its authors are students, or besides student co-author(s) there is one non-student co-author that confirms, at the moment of submission, that a clear majority of conceptual and implementation work was done by the student co-author(s).

Submitting Multiple Solvers

While we do not strictly limit the number of solvers submitted by a team, please refrain from submitting multiple solvers that share significant parts of algorithmic code to the same track. Instead, try unifying these solvers and optimizing the parameters used to submit a single solver. We reserve the right to remove solvers (or teams, if necessary) from the competition that heavily violate this rule. For instance, you are not allowed to submit the same solver multiple times using different parameters.