Scheduling the 41st-ORSA-Meeting Sessions: The Visiting-Fireman Problem, II

Abstract

The invited-paper program of the New Orleans ORSA meeting was organized so as to minimize the conflict among coscheduled sessions. A survey of a random sample of ORSA members was conducted; the respondents ranking their top session choices from a preliminary program. The results were processed into a weighted session-conflict matrix, with an optional override to reflect session chairmen's scheduling restrictions and multiple-presentation author constraints. The minimum-conflict schedule was produced heuristically by a combination of random schedule generation and discrete optimization.