AN INTEGER PROGRAMMING MODEL FOR THE CONFERENCE TIMETABLING PROBLEM

This study proposes a generic integer programming (IP) model to prepare the timetable of a custom conference. The proposed model not only allocates the conference topics to the sessions but also assigns presentations to the sessions in consistent with session topics. Beside, the number of presentations assigned to different sessions with the same topic (e.g., Logistics 1, Logistics 2 etc.) is balanced. The IP model is solved with two objective functions. The first is to minimize the number of cases in which more than one session with the same topic is assigned to the same time period within a day. The second one is to minimize the number of cases in which the number of presentations assigned to each parallel session is different from each other. A case study has been presented and discussed to show the applicability of the proposed IP model. The results indicate the same conference topic is not assigned to more than one parallel session and when the second objective function goes into the scheme, the number of periods, in which the number of presentations in parallel sessions is not the same, is reduced from eight to one.