O Problema de Programação de Sessões Técnicas de Conferências com Avaliadores

Abstract

Academic conferences are held every year in order to spread scientific knowledge. The Scientific Initiation Meeting (ENIC) is the main event in this scope hosted at the Federal University of Paraíba. Scheduling the event is a combinatorial problem that is difficult to be solved manually, as it involves choosing which presentations and examiners should be allocated to each technical session based on several factors, such as the similarity between the papers and the examiners’ affinity with the themes of the papers. This work presents a hybrid algorithm that combines mathematical formulations and elements from the metaheuristics Iterated Local Search and Simulated Annealing. Our method aims to schedule the event in such a way that its sessions have papers with similar themes, and examiners are not idle. Computational experiments with previous editions of ENIC demonstrate that our algorithm is effective, being able to find better results than the manual scheduling for all instances, especially when it comes to reducing the idleness of the examiners.