Scheduling the Brazilian OR conference
针对巴西运筹学会议约300场报告、3-4天的日程安排难题，提出一种结合迭代局部搜索、模拟退火和数学规划的数学启发式算法，通过聚类和集合划分生成高质量日程，在人工和真实实例上均优于现有方法。
In this paper, we propose an efficient matheuristic approach for solving the problem of scheduling the Brazilian OR conference. The event has traditionally around 300 presentations across a period of 3 to 4 days, and building a schedule for the technical sessions is an arduous task. The developed algorithm integrates the concepts of iterated local search and simulated annealing with two mathematical programming-based procedures. The idea is to group the presentations via a clustering procedure, and handle the side constraints in a subproblem via an integer programming formulation. A set partitioning procedure is applied at the end of the algorithm to find the optimal combination of clusters found during the search. We first assess the performance of the method by comparing our results with those attained by other algorithms from the literature on two existing sets of artificial instances derived from two other conferences. Next, we executed our approach on real-life instances derived from different SBPO editions, and compared the solutions with the manual solutions, when available, or with upper bounds (we solve a maximisation problem) found by an exact algorithm from the literature. The results obtained show that the matheuristic is capable of achieving high quality solutions both on the artificial and real-life instances.