A problem of scheduling conference accommodation

Abstract

A University hall of residence consists of a number of buildings, or houses, which are used during vacations to accommodate the delegates to conferences held at the University. For brevity, the totality of delegates attending a conference will be referred to as the conference.

As conference bookings are made, the conferences are assigned to the houses in which they will be accommodated. The problem studied in this paper is that of keeping to a minimum for each conference the number of different houses in which delegates of that conference are accommodated.

The model adopted is one in which all the bookings for the period under consideration are known at the start of the period and the problem is to make the assignments of conferences to accommodation in such a way as to maximuse the utility under the compactness criterion.