The fifth International Timetabling Competition ITC2021 aims to instigate further research on automated sports timetabling. The competition’s problem consists of constructing a compact double round-robin tournament with 16 to 20 teams while respecting various hard constraints and minimizing the penalties from violated soft constraints. This paper focuses on the organization of the ITC2021 competition, with a particular focus on the generation of a set of artificial though challenging, realistic, and diverse problem instances. For the latter, we present a set of features describing the structure of the problem instances, and use these features to construct the so-called instance space for sports timetabling. Several gaps in this space hint that existing problem instances from the literature are not very diverse. We therefore propose a novel integer programming approach to determine the feature values that cover these gaps, and show how to generate associated problem instances. Finally, we provide an overview of the participants and their contributions.

第五届国际时间表竞赛 ITC2021 旨在推动对自动化运动时间表的进一步研究。比赛的问题包括构建一个由 16 到 20 支队伍组成的紧凑型双循环锦标赛，同时尊重各种硬约束并最大限度地减少违反软约束的处罚。本文重点介绍 ITC2021 竞赛的组织，特别关注生成一组人工但具有挑战性、现实性和多样性的问题实例。对于后者，我们提出了一组描述问题实例结构的特征，并使用这些特征来构建所谓的运动时间表实例空间。这个空间中的几个空白暗示文献中现有的问题实例并不是很多样化。因此，我们提出了一种新颖的整数规划方法来确定覆盖这些差距的特征值，并展示如何生成相关的问题实例。最后，我们概述了参与者及其贡献。