Designing Conferences to Improve Resource Utilization and Participant Satisfaction

We look at a conference scheduling problem with the objective of maximizing the ability of participants to attend sessions of interest. This problem was addressed in an article by Eglese and Rand; conference scheduling has otherwise received little attention in management science literature. Related problems of class- and exam-scheduling have been extensively studied and published, yet few cases consider participant (e.g. student) preferences. Our formulation, which a variation of that used by Eglese and Rand, includes prioritized preferences for conference sessions, as well as schedule resource constraints. The purpose of this paper is to extend the previous work by exploring the impact of various scheduling decisions on participant satisfaction (measured by enrollment in desired sessions). We use a previously published algorithm to look at issues such as conference length and make general observations that may aid the conference-scheduling decision maker.