A portfolio-based analysis method for competition results
This work addresses the problem of better evaluating solver performance for researchers and practitioners in constraint solving competitions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing competition frameworks.
The paper tackles the limitation of traditional competition rankings that assess solvers based on average performance, which may not reflect their potential in portfolio-based solving, and presents a portfolio-based analysis method that provides complementary insights, as demonstrated on MiniZinc Challenge results.
Competitions such as the MiniZinc Challenges or the SAT competitions have been very useful sources for comparing performance of different solving approaches and for advancing the state-of-the-arts of the fields. Traditional competition setting often focuses on producing a ranking between solvers based on their average performance across a wide range of benchmark problems and instances. While this is a sensible way to assess the relative performance of solvers, such ranking does not necessarily reflect the full potential of a solver, especially when we want to utilise a portfolio of solvers instead of a single one for solving a new problem. In this paper, I will describe a portfolio-based analysis method which can give complementary insights into the performance of participating solvers in a competition. The method is demonstrated on the results of the MiniZinc Challenges and new insights gained from the portfolio viewpoint are presented.