Domain transformation approach: Optimizing the preference-based conference schedules via room sharing matrix

In the past few years, a great attention has been paid for enhancing, solving the conference scheduling problem especially in optimizing the preference-based conference scheduling. This is to ensure that the conference schedule can maximize the satisfactions of participants. Based on our findings, Domain Transformation Approach (DTA) is recently proven to be flexible in generating and producing an effective and good quality result in the preference-based conference scheduling problem. Despite generating good-quality schedules, a few shortcomings have been identified that can be further improved to optimize the schedules. Therefore, this paper proposes a new data representation that have richer information namely room sharing matrix that will be used in the DTA framework to help in optimizing the conference schedules. The main objectives of this study are to satisfy both hard and soft constraints of the problem. The proposed matrix namely room sharing matrix is practically effective and useful as to resolve the conference scheduling problem especially for session hopping problem and capacitated problem.