Scheduling conferences using data on attendees’ preferences

Abstract

Conference organisers often face the challenge of scheduling a scientific program. This problem usually involves many talks that must be scheduled in parallel, subject to time and space limitations. This paper adopts an Attendee-Based-Perspective to the conference scheduling problem, in which we collect (anonymised) data on attendees’ preferences and use these as a main driver to schedule the talks. We test three optimization approaches for this problem, based on integer programming formulations. The main approach divides the problem into two stages: the first stage schedules predefined thematic sessions and the second stage schedules talks within these sessions. We report results using real data instances of three conferences. The results show that our main approach can produce solutions swiftly, accommodating the requirements of the organisers while allowing attendees to attend most of their preferred talks. Our work has been used in practice to generate the actual schedule of these three conferences.