The 2027 Land-Doig MIP Competition

Explainability and Small Infeasible Subsystems

Preliminary announcement. Details that are still to be announced are listed below in To Be Announced; see also the timeline.

Submission Requirements

Report

All participants must submit a written report of 10 pages maximum plus references, in Springer LNCS format. The report and the code must be submitted together.

The report must include the following information:

  • A description of the method developed and implemented, including any necessary citations to the literature and software used.
  • A section discussing the methodological and/or engineering innovations of the method (see Evaluation Criteria). If you have any clever implementation techniques to showcase (e.g., performance optimizations), please highlight them (the jury will not check every detail of the code).
  • Computational results on the public competition set, including a table of results.

Code

The code should output a JSON file listing the elements relaxed and kept in the infeasible subsystem (linear constraints, bound constraints, and integrality constraints). Infeasibility certificates can be optionally specified and count towards certifying the system is irreducible.

Refer to the GitHub repository for the exact solution format and program interface.

Public sample instances and solutions are available.

Rules and Eligibility

Rules for Participation

  • Participants must not be an organizer of the competition nor a family member of a competition organizer. Otherwise, there is no restriction on participation.
  • Student participation is strongly encouraged.
  • Should participants be related to organizers of the competition (e.g., students of an organizer), the rest of the committee will decide whether a conflict of interest is at hand and affected organizers will not be part of the jury for the final evaluation.
  • Participants can be a single entrant or a team; there is no restriction on the size of teams.
  • Questions may be directed to the competition committee by opening an Issue or Discussion on the competition GitHub repository: https://github.com/mixedinteger/MIPcc27, which hosts the solution checker and helper scripts.

Technical Rules

  • Competitors cannot use commercial solvers as subroutines of the final submission.

Evaluation Platform

Each instance will have a wall-clock time limit of 3000 seconds, and each run will have at least 8 threads available. The exact hardware and memory limits will be announced later. See the program interface for how programs are invoked and how time is measured.

To Be Announced

The following will be published with the final rules:

  • Final evaluation details, including how criteria are combined and how failed, timed-out, or missing instance results are treated
  • Public and hidden evaluation instance sets (sample instances are already available)
  • Evaluation platform hardware and memory limits
  • Registration form and process, including conflict-of-interest disclosures
  • Submission process and exact dates and time zone