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https://github.com/esa/spoc3

The official GECCO 2024 Space Optimisation Competition (SpOC) organised by the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT).
https://github.com/esa/spoc3

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The official GECCO 2024 Space Optimisation Competition (SpOC) organised by the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT).

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README 

          
For the third time, the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team

(ACT) presents in cooperation with the [The Genetic and Evolutionary

Computation Conference

(GECCO)](https://gecco-2024.sigevo.org/HomePage) the *Space

Optimization Competition (SpOC)*. Look forward to three challenging

problems placed in an futuristic space mission scenario.



# SpOC 3: Orbital Megastructures 



The year is 2287 and you wander through the tunnels of Lunar

City. Passing by you favorite kiosk, which is the only one on the Moon

that still sells newspapers made out of *real* paper, an article

in *The Earth Observer* catches your eyes. You grab a copy and a cup of

100% Quetelet-Crate-Bean coffee.



**Winners of the Orbital Megastructure competition announced.**



After decades of negotiation, two of the most ambitious projects that

humanity has ever conceived are finally scheduled to commence next

year. The Golomb Ruler Advanced Interferometric Lens (GRAIL) and the

Orbital Assembly of Self-organising Interstellar Spacecraft (OASIS)

projects have been selected among more than three dozen candidates

competing for the immense amounts of funding. Despite the fierce

competition, the unanimous opinion is that the sheer ambition and

scope of cooperation on these projects will elevate humanity to a new

level as a species. 



Although the winning projects could not be more different, they are

inexorably linked. The veteran GRAIL project (the oldest of all

proposals, first conceived in the distant 21st century), overcame

severe criticism and convinced the judges with solid arguments for its

usefulness. The GRAIL project became relevant overnight with the

discovery of Gaia Gemina - the likely habitable 'Earth twin' planet

located squarely in the middle of the Goldilocks zone around an

inconspicuous Sun-like star in the constellation of Sagittarius. The

GRAIL team promises that the project will be completed within record

time using new materials and orbital stabilisation mechanisms,

enabling astronomers to examine Gaia Gemina and its cosmic

neighbourhood in unprecedented detail just a few years from now. 



In contrast, OASIS is a latecomer to the project race. It represents

the hope of humanity to become a space-faring species by sending the

first crew of people to Gaia Gemina. Initially viewed as a practically

impossible task, the construction of the multi-generational

interstellar ship is now scheduled to begin in orbit around Earth at

the same time as the GRAIL project. The ship - which has yet to be

given a name - must be large and sophisticated enough to sustain

several generations of pioneers on their way to Gaia Gemina. 



Of course, both GRAIL and OASIS would depend on the outcome of the

Graph Reduction Algorithm for Planetary-scale Hyperoptimisation

(GRAPH) meta-project. Originally selected as the tool of choice for

solving challenges such as those posed by GRAIL and OASIS, the

pressure for this approach to work has increased manyfold with the

completion of the multi-year negotiation marathon for funding GRAIL

and OASIS. As the winning projects are scheduled to commence next

year, it remains to be seen whether GRAPH was indeed the right choice. 



Whatever the outcome, rallying behind these projects - not at the

local or national but at the _planetary_ level - is no small feat, and

the sense of accomplishment and anticipation is already

palpable. Needless to say, the stakes are high for all projects to

succeed in the mission to guarantee the safety of the first intrepid

interstellar explorers! 



## Competition Structure



SpOC 3.0 contains three distinct problems centered around a futuristic

space mission. Starting from **1 April 2024, End of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)** you have **three** months

to tackle these challenges to secure a spot on the leaderboard, i.e., until

**30 June 2024, End of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)**.



**Detailed technical descriptions for the three challenges to be

solved will be made available on the [Optimise

platform](https://optimise.esa.int) from the same date.** 



### Challenge 1: Torso Decompositions



Before we can start designing astonishing megastructures in the GRAIL

or OASIS project, we need to arrange the building blocks

suitably. These blocks, called nodes or vertices, are bound to

specific pairwise interactions. Some blocks clearly belong to the same

part of the megastructure, while others share no interaction. For an

effective and energy-efficient structure setup, it is critical to

identify an ordering of the nodes that indicates parts of the structure that can be

assembled concurrently, and that encodes a global blueprint for recursively

constructing the megastructure. At the Graph Reduction Algorithm for

Planetary-scale Hyper-optimisation (GRAPH) meta-project, we develop

the toolkit for exactly this task -- and we hope that engaged scientists and

engineers like you will help us to complete the project in time!



### Challenge 2: Interferometric Mission



Welcome to the GRAIl project, where our sights are set on one vital

mission: high-resolution interferometric measurements. These

measurements are crucial to map distortions in space-time in order to

effectively navigate through warps and folds. Without their high

precision, spacecraft risk being lost in the fabric of space-time,

never to return. Scientists figured out that a constellation of

satellites can achieve the needed precision by forming a large

synthetic aperture. Unbeknownst to them, there is an intricate hurdle

that they still need to overcome: how to arrange the satellites such

that they maintain a useful configuration over several orbits? It

turns out that the configuration of satellites which results in the

highest resolution is also the one which best follows the mathematical

structure of Golomb patterns. Synchronizing these orbits and

coordinating observations requires the collective expertise of

scientists, engineers, and innovators like you!



### Challenge 3: Programmable Cubes



Welcome to the OASIS project, one of humanity's flagship research

projects for in-space assembly of megastructures! [Even way back in

the 21st century](https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/tesserae-self-assembling-space-architecture/overview/),

scientists envisioned ships and habitats to self-assemble in space

from small components that can be easily deployed from Earth. Now this

dream is finally getting closer with the programmable cubes

technology: small cubes of different designs capable of forming

complex and fully functional structures when interconnected.



The missing building block for this technology is an efficient and

scalable algorithm for assembling structures. To solve this, we need

the help of every student, scientist and engineer out there interested

in contributing to the OASIS project! To test your algorithms, we

generated prototype scenarios where you have to assemble two

historical spacecraft from the early days of human space exploration:

**The International Space Station (ISS)** and the **James Webb Space

Telescope (JWST)**. For final evaluation, we also give you a single

assembly scenario of the planned multi-generational interstellar ship

**Enterprise**. If successful, your algorithm might give us the

missing puzzle piece for constructing this massive ship in orbit and

boldly go where no one has gone before!



### Guidelines and Rules



The competition will be hosted on the

  [Optimise](https://optimise.esa.int/) platform developed by the

  Advanced Concepts Team. Participants will need to register online on the

  platform, and solution entries will need to be submitted via

  Optimise for validation. While SpOC is organized in cooperation with

  GECCO 2024, it is *not* required to attend GECCO 2024 in order to

  participate in SpOC.



- Your objective is to propose and implement metaheuristic algorithms

  to solve the proposed optimisation challenges. 

- In order to validate your solutions, we will provide you with Python

  validation code for each of the three challenges. This code includes

  problem definitions in the [Pygmo](https://esa.github.io/pygmo2/#)

  user-defined problem (UDP) format, examples of solutions, and

  visualisation tools. 

- You have until **30 June 2024** to submit your entries via the dedicated portal [Optimise](https://optimise.esa.int/).

- Please comply with our [basic code of

  honour](https://optimise.esa.int/terms). The ACT reserves the right

  to exclude users from the competition if they abuse the evaluation

  system.



## Scoring and Winner Selection 



This year, SpOC implements a 2-out-of-3 scoring scheme that, simply

put, means that for the overall competition only two 

challenges are taken into account. In detail, you will obtain a *local score*

$s_i$ for each of the three challenges computed via the the rules below,

then your *global score* is $g=\max(s_1+s_2, s_1+s_3, s_2+s_3)$. The global score defines your place on the overall SpOC

leaderboard and the winners of SpOC 3. 



Each challenge $i=1,2,3$ contains *three problems* (easy, medium, and

hard). Every problem has its own leaderboard (visible on

[Optimise](https://optimise.esa.int/)) that ranks participants

according to the objective of the challenge. The top ten ranks on the

leaderboard of the easy instance get $e_i=10,9,8,\dots,1$ points, similarly

$m_i=\frac{4}{3}10,\frac{4}{3}9,\dots,\frac{4}{3}$ points for the top

ten teams on the medium problem, and 

$h_i=(\frac{4}{3})^2 10,(\frac{4}{3})^2 9,\dots,(\frac{4}{3})^2$ points for the hard

problem. The score $s_i$ for the challenge then simply is the sum $s_i=e_i+m_i+h_i$.



We wish all participants the best of luck and are excited to see what you accomplish!



## Timeline



The Space Optimization Competition starts at the **first of April, End

of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE):** 



**NOTE**: The submission portal remains open after **30 June

2024, End of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)**. Submissions received after that date will not be taken into

consideration for the competition, but still appear on the

leaderboard. 



## Contact



Our primary means of communication with competitors will be the

*Discussions* feature on this repository. Please use it to ask

any questions you may have about the challenges or to exchange

information with us. We will do our best to respond to your questions

in a timely manner. 



If you encounter a bug in the code, please use this repository's

*Issues* feature to report it.