Abstract

The scheduling of conferences is a challenging task that aims at creating successful conference programs that fulfill an often wide variety of requirements. In this work, we focus on the problem of generating conference programs that organize talks into tracks: subevents within the conference that are group-related talks. The main contributions of this work can be organized into three scopes: literature review, problem formulation and benchmarking, and heuristic approach. We provide a literature review of conference scheduling approaches that organizes these approaches within a timetabling problem taxonomy. We also describe the main characteristics of the conference scheduling approaches in the literature and propose a classification scheme for such works. To study the scheduling of conferences that include tracks, we introduce the definition of the track-based conference scheduling problem, a new problem that incorporates tracks in the conference program. We provide a binary integer linear programming model formulation for this problem. Our formulation considers the availability of presenters, chairs, and organizers, the avoidance of parallel tracks, and best paper sessions, among other classical constraints of conference scheduling problems. Additionally, based on our formulation, we propose a simple instance-generation procedure that we apply to generate a set of artificial instances. We complete our work by proposing a heuristic method based on the simulated annealing metaheuristic for solving the track-based conference scheduling problem. We compare the results obtained by our heuristic approach and the Gurobi solver …