Call for Problem Submission for the MiniZinc Challenge 2021

The MiniZinc Challenge is an annual solver competition in the Constraint Programming (CP) community held before the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. The MiniZinc Challenge 2021 is seeking interesting problem sets on which various constraint solving technologies should be compared on this year. Everyone is allowed to submit problems regardless of whether they are an entrant in the challenge.

Important dates and deadlines:

  • Problem submission open: now
  • Problem submission deadline: Fri, 9 July 2021

Problem submission

  • Send an email with the subject line [MZNC21] benchmark to mzn-challenge ‘at’ lists.csiro.au and attach an archive containing your problem.

There are no restrictions on the kind of problems, but ideally they should be of interesting nature such as practice-related problems and puzzles etc. Problem submissions with real-world instances are particularly welcome. We may need to make some modifications to submitted models to ensure they are in a format suitable for the challenge.

The problem submitter should provide a MiniZinc model of the problem and at least 20 instances ranging from easy-to-solve to hard-to-solve for an “ordinary” CP system. In addition, there should be at least one “toy” instance for testing purposes. It is strongly encouraged to make use of the global constraint definitions provided in the MiniZinc 2.5 distribution. If you have an instance generator, we are more than happy to receive it.

The submitted problem must be placed under the MIT licence, and each model and data file must begin with a comment which includes the licence. If you are unable to use this licence, please let us know so we can arrange an alternative.

Please follow the links below for submission instructions and requirements.

www.minizinc.org/challenge2021/challenge.html
www.minizinc.org/challenge2021/rules2021.html