Scheduling the Brazilian OR conference

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient matheuristic approach for solving the problem of scheduling the Brazilian OR conference. The event has traditionally around 300 presentations across a period of 3 to 4 days, and building a schedule for the technical sessions is an arduous task. The developed algorithm integrates the concepts of iterated local search and simulated annealing with two mathematical programming-based procedures. The idea is to group the presentations via a clustering procedure, and handle the side constraints in a subproblem via an integer programming formulation. A set partitioning procedure is applied at the end of the algorithm to find the optimal combination of clusters found during the search. We first assess the performance of the method by comparing our results with those attained by other algorithms from the literature on two existing sets of artificial instances derived from two other conferences. Next, we executed our approach on real-life instances derived from different SBPO editions, and compared the solutions with the manual solutions, when available, or with upper bounds (we solve a maximisation problem) found by an exact algorithm from the literature. The results obtained show that the matheuristic is capable of achieving high quality solutions both on the artificial and real-life instances.

Keywords:

• Scheduling
• combinatorial optimisation
• metaheuristics
• practice of OR
• decision support systems

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the SBPO organisers for providing the real-life data, and Dr. Dragan Urosevic for kindly sharing the executable file of the SGVNS algorithm.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Brazilian research agency CNPq under Grant number 307843/2018-1.