Industrial Challenge Competition @ GECCO 2012 Announced!

The goal of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge is to develop accurate forecasting methods for electrical energy consumption profiles. Based on real-world energy consumption time series data, as recorded by modern smart-metering equipment, these methods should provide accurate predictions of electrical energy consumption. As smartmetering involves large volumes of streamed time series data, acceptable forecasting methods must be accurate and computationally efficient.

The objective of this competition is to provide accurate time series predictions of electrical energy consumption based on real-world training data. Based on these training data, participants of the challenge must provide quarter-hourly predicted electrical energy consumption time series that extend each of the given training time series into the future.

The challenge is organized in a single round. In order to participate in the competition, appropriate predictions for the four training data sets given have to be supplied. Submissions are accompanied by a two page report describing the algorithm that has been applied to generate the prediction time series.

Participants of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge will maintain all rights to their forecasting methods and systems. The organizers will not share a submission without explicit permission of the participant. Nonetheless, participants are expected to describe their methods to the GECCO 2012 community.

Highlights of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge include:

• Interesting Problem Domain: Forecasting energy consumption profiles based on smart-metering data offers a challenging and highly relevant test case for modern time series prediction methods.
• Real-world Data: Multiple real quarter-hourly energy consumption time series data sets are provided for training and assessing forecasting methods.
• Realistic Quality Measurement: Forecasting methods are assessed by their prediction accuracy for a continuum of prediction horizons, ranging from minutes to weeks into the future.
• Fair Submission Assessment: Prediction accuracy is determined on test data available to the organizers, which will be made public after the competition ends.
• Direct Link to Industry: The challenge’s industry partner GreenPocket GmbH, a provider of modern smart-metering software, will evaluate the winning submissions for commercial application
  and will be in direct contact with the winning participants.

For further information, data and conditions please see GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge.

Important Dates and Contacts:

• Software and Data Availability: immediately
• Challenge Submission Deadline: June 22, 2012
• GECCO-2011 Conference in Philadelphia: July 07-11, 2012
• Contact: gecco at f10.fh-koeln.de

Organizing Committee and Sponsors

Oliver Flasch, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Martina Friese, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Wolfgang Konen, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Jens Neuhalfen, GreenPocket GmbH
Pier Luca Lanzi, Politecnico di Milano
Jorn Mehnen, Cranfield University

GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ACM SIGEVO).