A Survey on Online Judge Systems and Their Applications

TL;DR

This survey reviews the diverse applications and classifications of online judge systems, highlighting their role in education, competitions, and complex problem solving, exemplified by the Optil.io platform.

Contribution

It provides a formal definition of online judge systems, categorizes their applications, and analyzes a case study demonstrating their effectiveness in solving complex challenges.

Findings

Online judge systems support various applications including competitions, education, and data mining.

Crowdsourcing enhances the ability of online judges to solve complex industrial and scientific problems.

The Optil.io platform successfully applied online judging to optimize complex problems.

Abstract

Online judges are systems designed for the reliable evaluation of algorithm source code submitted by users, which is next compiled and tested in a homogeneous environment. Online judges are becoming popular in various applications. Thus, we would like to review the state of the art for these systems. We classify them according to their principal objectives into systems supporting organization of competitive programming contests, enhancing education and recruitment processes, facilitating the solving of data mining challenges, online compilers and development platforms integrated as components of other custom systems. Moreover, we introduce a formal definition of an online judge system and summarize the common evaluation methodology supported by such systems. Finally, we briefly discuss an Optil.io platform as an example of an online judge system, which has been proposed for the solving of complex optimization problems. We also analyze the competition results conducted using this platform. The competition proved that online judge systems, strengthened by crowdsourcing concepts, can be successfully applied to accurately and efficiently solve complex industrial- and science-driven challenges.