Anand Subramanian - Conference scheduling: a clustering-based approach

Part of Discrete Optimization Talks: talks.discrete...
Anand Subramanian - Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil
Conference scheduling: a clustering-based approach
Speaker webpage: scholar.google...
Abstract: Scheduling the technical sessions of scientific events is an arduous task commonly faced by many organizers worldwide. Due to the particularities of each conference, there is no consensus regarding the problem definition, and researchers have tackled each specific case individually. Despite their distinct characteristics, one often expects the sessions to be composed of presentations of similar scope. This natural assumption led us to define a basic yet sufficiently general version of the problem that aims at maximizing the benefit of clustering papers with common topics in the same session, while leaving the particularities of the event to be addressed by means of side constraints. Three mathematical formulations based on integer linear programming are proposed for the problem, which in turn is shown to be NP-hard. The first model consists of a compact formulation, whereas the second and third models serve as underlying formulations for branch-and-cut (BC) and branch-cut-and-price (BCP) algorithms, respectively. Computational experiments were carried out on real-life and artificial instances derived from two conferences, considering several scenarios. While the compact formulation and the BC procedure could solve instances with moderate size, the BCP approach managed to produce tight bounds for instances with up to 163 presentations.
Bio: Anand Subramanian is an Associate Professor at Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB), Brazil. He received his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Production Engineering from UFPB in 2006 and his M.Sc. degree in Production Engineering in 2008 from the same institution. He obtained his doctorate in Computing in 2012 from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil. His doctoral thesis received the Honorable Mention award from the Brazilian Ministry of Education and it was selected among the top 6 thesis (presented in 2012) by the Brazilian Computing Society. His research interests are mainly related to developing heuristic, exact and hybrid algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. Anand is an author of more than 50 articles published in prestigious international journals. In 2016 he received the highly cited research award from Elsevier for the paper "A hybrid algorithm for a class of vehicle routing problems" published in Computers & Operations Research (C&OR). In addition, he was the supervisor of the works that won the prize for the best undergraduate paper at the Brazilian OR Conference in 2015 and 2021. Moreover, he has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of C&OR since 2019, and coordinates or has coordinated 11 research projects with public or private funding. Anand is the organizer and host of the "Subject to" podcast.