Scheduling Meetings at Trade Events with Complex Preferences

We present a complex scheduling problem where we want to plan meetings between customers and exhibitors at a trade event. One cause of the complexity of the problem is the general nature of the preferences expressed by the participants prior to the event. These map a set of requesters to a set of requested participants and express a preferred length of the meeting. A further source of complexity is that the quality of the solution not only depends on the realisation of the preferences in the solution but also on the distance covered by the customers. We present our solution method and the results of preliminary computational experiments.