[Please circulate to all those who might be interested, and accept our apologies if you received multiple copies of this announcement.]

The Second Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge - CHeSC 2014           
www.hyflex.org/chesc2014/

The CHeSC series seeks to bring together practitioners from operational research, computer science and artificial intelligence who are interested in developing more general and reusable methods for automated search control; doing so using hyper-heuristics that can be applied without modification to solve a wide range of instances from different problem domains. In CHeSC 2011, the hyper-heuristic was used to solve each instance separately and independently in a fixed time.  

CHeSC 2014 uses a "batch mode" in which the hyper-heuristic is given all the instances as a batch, together with a total time to solve them.  As before, the hyper-heuristic then needs to decide how to use the supplied low-level heuristics (move/neighbourhood operators) for the problem domain in order to provide a solution for each instance in the batch.  However, new challenges arise because the hyper-heuristic has the opportunity to:

* Decide how to allocate computational time between the instances

* Learn from some instances to be able to work better on others. 

To support these, some limited information about features of each instance (size and “kind”) is also made available to the hyper-heuristic.

The challenge is open now and with the deadline given below.

Competition Starts:   28 November 2013
Submission Deadline:  28 March 2014

Hence, you have four months to produce a "batch mode hyper-heuristic" that is able to solve a set of instances associated with multiple domains. 

To encourage transition towards exploitation of multi-core machines, the competition has two tracks:

1) "Single-solver mode" - only one solver is allowed to run at a time.

2) "Multiple-solver mode" - multiple solvers are allowed to exploit the multiple cores of machine that will be used for evaluation.

In total, £1,200 will be given as prizes to the implementers of top ranking algorithms in the competition.

Sponsors:

-The Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning (ASAP) research group (www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk)
-The LANCS Initiative (www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk)

Please consult the webpage www.hyflex.org/chesc2014/
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at [log in to unmask] 

On behalf of the organisers,
Jose Carlos Ortiz-Bayliss