Designing the CLAIO 2022 conference program with combinatorial optimization techniques

Designing the scientific program of a technical conference is a nontrivial task, in particular when there are many parallel sessions to be scheduled. In this setting, each session must be composed by a thematically coherent set of presentations, whereas sessions attracting a similar audience should not be scheduled simultaneously. In this work we explore this issue, by proposing a combinatorial optimization model representing this situation and by presenting computational techniques that allow to obtain good-quality solutions for this problem. We illustrate the application of these techniques to the scientific program of the XXI Latin-Iberoamerican Conference in Operations Research, which took place in December, 2022. We present experiments assessing the general contribution of the computational machinery proposed in this work, concluding that these techniques allow to automatically design the scientific program of a mid- to large-sized conference while taking into account the mentioned criteria.