Conference Scheduler

Overview

A Python tool to assist the task of scheduling a conference which:

• Can take an existing schedule and validate it against a set of constraints
• Can calculate a new valid, optimal schedule
• Can calculate a new, valid schedule also optimised to be the minimum change necessary from another given schedule
• Has the resources, constraints and optimisations defined below built in
• Has a simple mechanism for defining new constraints and optimisations
• Is a standalone tool which takes simple data types as input and produces simple data types as output (i.e. does no IO or presentation)

The full documentation can be found at conference-scheduler.readthedocs.org.

Terms

• Slot - a combination of room and period
• Session - an ordered series of slots (e.g. 'the session in room 1 between coffee and lunch on Friday')
• Event - a talk or workshop
• Demand - the predicted size of audience for an event
• Capacity - the capacity of venues

Constraints

• All events must be scheduled
• A slot may only have a maximum of one event scheduled
• An event must not be scheduled in a slot for which it has been marked as unavailable
• An event must not be scheduled at the same time as another event for which it has been marked not to clash
• An event may be tagged and, if so, must be scheduled in a session where it shares at least one tag with all other events in that session

Optimisation

Two options:

• The sum of 'potential disappointments' should be minimised where 'potential disappointments' is defined as the excess of demand over room capacity for every scheduled event
• Minimise the number of changes from a given schedule.

Examples

Some examples of situations which have arisen at previous conferences and could be handled by the unavailability, clashing and tagging constraints:

• A conference organiser says "Talks X and Y are on similar subject matter and likely to appeal to a similar audience. Let's try not to schedule them against each other."
• A conference organiser says "Talks X, Y and Z are likely to appeal to a similar audience. Let's try to schedule them sequentially in the same room so that we minimise the movement of people from one room to another."
• A conference organiser says "The audience for Talk X would benefit greatly from the speech-to-text provision. Let's schedule that one in the main hall."
• A potential session chair says "I'd like to attend workshop X, so please don't schedule me to chair a session that clashes with it."
• A potential session chair says "I'm happy to chair a session but I've never done it before, so please don't schedule me in the main hall."
• A speaker says "I'd like to attend talk X, so please don't schedule my talk in the same slot."
• A first-time speaker is assigned a mentor and requests that the mentor chairs the session in which they are scheduled to give their talk.

Acknowledgements

This repository was inspired by a talk given by David MacIver at PyCon UK 2016: http://2016.pyconuk.org/talks/easy-solutions-to-hard-problems/