Scheduling school meetings

Abstract

Prespecified meetings between teachers and parents have to be scheduled. All meetings have the same duration. The goal is in finding a schedule minimizing the total time and the parents' idle times. This NP-hard problem is addressed by solving first a sequence of weighted assignment problems and then performing a large scale neighborhood search based on finding negative cost cycles and shortest paths in directed graphs. This approach provides good computational results. Finally a variant of the problem with two different durations for the meetings is considered. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.