The DEBS 2021 grand challenge: analyzing environmental impact of worldwide lockdowns

The ACM DEBS 2021 Grand Challenge (GC) is the eleventh episode of a series of programming challenge competitions that began in 2011. Every year, participants of the GC are provided with new datasets and practical problems, and the challenge receives novel and high performant solutions from research, academia, and industry. The theme of the DEBS '21 GC is analyzing the environmental effects of COVID-19 restrictions. This year's edition of the GC is the first to explicitly focus on the integration and practicability of the solutions by fostering the use of distributed solutions based on widely-used open-source platforms and by requiring participants to address non-functional properties besides correctness of the solution. This paper describes the dataset used, formalizes the problem statement, and explains the evaluation platform that made dataset distribution and remote evaluation possible with our new virtualized infrastructure.