Conferences are a key aspect of communicating knowledge, and their schedule plays a vital role in meeting the expectations of participants. Given that many conferences have different constraints and objectives, different mathematical models and heuristic methods have been designed to address rather specific requirements of the conferences being studied per se. We present a penalty system that allows organisers to set up scheduling preferences for tracks and submissions regarding sessions and rooms, and regarding the utilisation of rooms within sessions. In addition, we also consider hybrid and online conferences where submissions need to be scheduled in appropriate sessions based on timezone information. A generic scheduling tool is presented that schedules tracks into sessions and rooms, and submissions into sessions by minimising the penalties subject to certain hard constraints. Two integer programming models are presented: an exact model and an extended model. Both models were tested on five real instances and on two artificial instances which required the scheduling of several hundreds of time slots. The results showed that the exact model achieved optimal solutions for all instances except for one instance which resulted in 0.001% optimality gap, and the extended model handles more complex and additional constraints for some instances. Overall, this work demonstrates the suitability of the proposed generic approach to optimise schedules for in-person, hybrid, and online conferences.

中文翻译：

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使用整数规划进行会议安排的通用方法

会议是知识交流的一个关键方面，其日程安排对于满足参与者的期望起着至关重要的作用。鉴于许多会议有不同的限制和目标，设计了不同的数学模型和启发式方法来满足正在研究的会议本身的相当具体的要求。我们提出了一个惩罚系统，允许组织者设置有关会议和房间以及会议内房间利用率的轨道和提交的调度首选项。此外，我们还考虑混合会议和在线会议，其中需要根据时区信息将提交安排在适当的会议中。提出了一种通用的调度工具，通过最小化受到某些硬约束的惩罚来安排曲目进入会议和房间，以及提交到会议。提出了两种整数规划模型：精确模型和扩展模型。这两个模型都在五个真实实例和两个需要调度数百个时隙的人工实例上进行了测试。结果表明，除了一个导致 0.001% 最优性差距的实例之外，精确模型对所有实例都实现了最优解，并且扩展模型可以处理某些实例的更复杂和额外的约束。总体而言，这项工作证明了所提出的通用方法对于优化面对面会议、混合会议和在线会议日程的适用性。