The Conference Scheduling Problem

This book studies exact solution procedures for the so-called Conference Scheduling Problem (CSP), which seeks to minimize the duration of a conference, where some of the activities cannot be held concurrently. The CSP corresponds to non-preemptive scheduling of independent activities with dedicated resources and constitutes a special case within the more general Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as well as the machine scheduling framework, and as such it is NP-hard. The core characteristics of CSP are commonly encountered in problems of different domains and therefore the problem is of high practical relevance. The book focuses on the analysis and comparison of graph-based solution procedures, which operate on a constrained graph that is derived from the confliciting acitivies to be scheduled. In particular Interval Coloring and Comparability Graph Augmentation are considered. An emphasis is put on the investigation of variations of the latter procedure, which exploits the structure of the constraint graph and is therefore robust to variations in the activity durations.