Conference scheduling: a personalized approach

Scientific conferences are an essential part of academic research. It falls upon the organizers to develop a schedule that allows the participants to attend the presentations of their interest. We present a combined approach of assigning presentations to rooms and time slots, grouping presentations into sessions, and deciding on an optimal itinerary for each participant. Our goal is to maximize attendance, taking into account the common practice of session hopping. On a secondary level, we accommodate presenters’ availabilities. We use a hierarchical optimization approach, sequentially solving integer programming models, which has been applied to construct the schedule of the MAPSP2015 conference.

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