The Ninth DIMACS Implementation Challenge:
The Shortest Path Problem

November 13 - 14, 2006
DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers:

Camil Demetrescu, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

Andrew Goldberg, Microsoft Research

David Johnson, AT&T Labs - Research, dsj@research.att.com

Special thanks go to Microsoft Research for its contribution to this meeting.

Call for Participation:

This challenge is open to anyone who wishes to participate. Participants can submit either algorithms or problem instances. Participants may submit results for as many algorithms as they wish.

If you are interested in participating in the Challenge, send email to goldberg@microsoft.com to let us know of your plans. A good way to be kept in the loop is registering to the Challenge mailing list.

How to participate
Participants should download benchmark instances and code for the problem they address from download page. The page describes the file formats and includes instructions for using the instance generators to create the synthetic instances in the testbed.

Your work can take two different directions.

• Instances for algorithm evaluation
  The instances should be natural and interesting. By the latter we mean instances that cause good algorithms to behave differently from the other instances. Interesting real-life application data is especially welcome.

• Algorithm evaluation
  Description of implementations of algorithms with experimental data that supports conclusion about practical performance. Common benchmark instances and codes should be used so that there is common ground for comparison. The most obvious way for such a paper to be interesting (and selected for the proceedings) is if the implementation improves state-of-the-art. However, there may be other ways to produce and interesting paper, for example by showing that an approach that looks well in theory does not work well in practice by explaining why this is the case.

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