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SpOC: Space Optimisation Competition

Deadline: 2026-07-01
Webpage: https://optimise.esa.int/

Description

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Space Optimization Competition (SpOC), hosted by the European Space Agency. This competition serves as a driving force for the application of evolutionary techniques to address optimization challenges relevant to mission analysis and space-related endeavors. Participants are tasked with solving optimization problems inspired by realistic mission scenarios set in the distant future.

The primary objective of SpOC is to bridge the gap between the engineering-focused space community and researchers specializing in genetic and evolutionary algorithms. We aim to explore innovative solutions for mission-critical tasks through the application of these algorithms, while simultaneously presenting fresh and challenging benchmark sets to the research community.

Commencing on April 1, 2026, participants will have a three-month window to tackle the presented challenges and vie for the top position on the SpOC leaderboard. The competition will be hosted on the Optimise platform (https://optimise.esa.int/) provided by the European Space Agency, offering access to benchmark scenarios, evaluation tools, and a publicly accessible leaderboard.

Abstract Submission

The competition allows 2-page contributions to the GECCO Companion to present short descriptions of the competition entry, focusing on algorithmic design, strengths and limitations. The 2-page abstract paper will require at least one author to register at the conference as a presenter. It is important to mention that these 2-page abstracts ARE NOT APC Eligible (no publication fee has to be paid by the authors) under the current ACM Open publishing guidelines. The following dates are relevant for these submissions:

  • Submission opening: April 1, 2026
  • Submission deadline: April 21, 2026
  • Notification: April 28, 2026
  • Camera-ready: May 5, 2026
  • Author's mandatory registration: May 11, 2026

Organizers

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Max Bannach

Max Bannach is an AI System Engineer in the AI and Data Science Section at the European Space
Agency (ESA). Before, he was a Research Fellow in ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team and a PostDoc
at the Universität zu Lübeck, where he completed his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science in 2019. His research interests are automated reasoning, descriptive complexity, and algorithmic graph theory. Currently, he is working on logic-based optimization, structure-guided automated reasoning, and the usage of symbolic AI to simulate and verify gate-based quantum computers.


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Dario Izzo

Dr. Izzo graduated in Aeronautical Engineering from the University Sapienza of Rome in 1999 and later obtained a second master in “Satellite Platforms” at the University of Cranfield in the UK and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Modelling in 2003, at the University Sapienza of Rome. In 2004, he moved to the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands as a research fellow in Mission Analysis. Dr. Izzo is now heading the Advanced Concepts Team and managing its interface to the rest of ESA. During the years spent with the ACT, he has led studies in interplanetary trajectory design and artificial intelligence and he took part in several other innovative researches on diverse fields. He started the Global Trajectory Optimization Competitions events, the ESA’s Summer of Code in Space, and the Kelvins competition platform (https://kelvins.esa.int/). Dr. Izzo has published more than 150 papers in journals, conferences and books. In GECCO 2013, he received the Humies Gold Medal for the work on grand tours of the Galilean moons and, the following year, he won the 8th edition of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition, organized by NASA/JPL, leading a mixed team of ESA/JAXA scientists. His interests range from computer science, open source software development, interplanetary trajectory optimization, biomimetics and artificial intelligence.