{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Constraint Solving Approaches to the Business-to-Business Meeting Scheduling Problem (Extended Abstract)","authors":[{"name":"Miquel Bofill","slug":"miquel-bofill","given":"Miquel","family":"Bofill","affiliation":"IMAE department , University of Girona , Girona , Spain"},{"name":"Jordi Coll","slug":"jordi-coll","given":"Jordi","family":"Coll","affiliation":"Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA , CSIC) , Bellaterra , Spain"},{"name":"Marc Garcia","slug":"marc-garcia","given":"Marc","family":"Garcia","affiliation":"IMAE department , University of Girona , Girona , Spain"},{"name":"Jesús Giráldez-Cru","slug":"jesus-giraldez-cru","given":"Jesús","family":"Giráldez-Cru","affiliation":"DaSCI institute , DECSAI , University of Granada , Granada , Spain"},{"name":"Gilles Pesant","slug":"gilles-pesant","given":"Gilles","family":"Pesant","affiliation":"Polytechnique Montréal , Montréal , Canada"},{"name":"Josep Suy","slug":"josep-suy","given":"Josep","family":"Suy","affiliation":"IMAE department , University of Girona , Girona , Spain"},{"name":"Mateu Villaret","slug":"mateu-villaret","given":"Mateu","family":"Villaret","affiliation":"IMAE department , University of Girona , Girona , Spain"}],"abstract":"The B2B Meeting Scheduling Optimization Problem (B2BSP) consists of scheduling a set of meetings between given pairs of participants to an event, minimizing idle time periods in participants' schedules, while taking into account participants’ availability and accommodation capacity. Therefore, it constitutes a challenging combinatorial problem in many real-world B2B events.\r\n\r\nThis work presents a comparative study of several approaches to solve this problem. They are based on Constraint Programming (CP), Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). The CP approach relies on using global constraints and has been implemented in MiniZinc to be able to compare CP, Lazy Clause Generation and MIP as solving technologies in this setting. A pure MIP encoding is also presented. Finally, an alternative viewpoint is considered under MaxSAT, showing the best performance when considering some implied constraints. Experimental results on real world B2B instances, as well as on crafted ones, show that the MaxSAT approach is the one with the best performance for this problem, exhibiting better solving times, sometimes even orders of magnitude smaller than CP and MIP.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2023/768","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/768","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/0768.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/768.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/bibtex/768","volume":{"slug":"2023","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2023","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/","year":2023,"location":"Macao, SAR","dates":"19-25 August 2023","editors":"Edith Elkind","isbn":"978-1-956792-03-4","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2023"},"section":"Journal Track","track":"Journal Track","number":768,"pages":{"first":6851,"last":6852},"keywords":["Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: CSO: Applications","Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: CSO: Modeling","Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: CSO: Constraint programming"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Bofill et al., 2014] Miquel Bofill, Joan Espasa, Marc Gar- cia, Miquel Palahí, Josep Suy, and Mateu Villaret. Scheduling B2B Meetings. In 20th International Confer- ence on Principles and Practice of Constraint Program- ming, CP 2014, volume 8656 of LNCS, pages 781-796. Springer, 2014.","title":"Scheduling B2B Meetings","authors":"Miquel Bofill, Joan Espasa, Marc Garcia, Miquel Palahí, Josep Suy, Mateu Villaret","year":"2014","venue":"20th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming","doi":null,"url":null,"internal_url":null},{"position":2,"raw":"[Bofill et al., 2015] Miquel Bofill, Marc Garcia, Josep Suy, and Mateu Villaret. MaxSAT-based scheduling of B2B meetings. In Proc. of CPAIOR 2015, pages 65-73, 2015.","title":"MaxSAT-based scheduling of B2B meetings","authors":"Miquel Bofill, Marc Garcia, Josep Suy, Mateu Villaret","year":"2015","venue":"Proc. of CPAIOR 2015","doi":null,"url":null,"internal_url":null},{"position":3,"raw":"[Bofill et al., 2022] Miquel Bofill, Jordi Coll, Marc Garcia, Jesús Giráldez-Cru, Gilles Pesant, Josep Suy, and Mateu Villaret. Constraint solving approaches to the business-to- business meeting scheduling problem. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 74:263-301, 2022.","title":"Constraint solving approaches to the business-tobusiness meeting scheduling problem","authors":"Miquel Bofill, Jordi Coll, Marc Garcia, Jesús Giráldez-Cru, Gilles Pesant, Josep Suy, Mateu Villaret","year":"2022","venue":"Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research","doi":null,"url":null,"internal_url":null},{"position":4,"raw":"[Pesant et al., 2015] Gilles Pesant, Gregory Rix, and Louis- Martin Rousseau. A comparative study of MIP and CP formulations for the B2B scheduling optimization prob- lem. In Proc. of CPAIOR 2015, pages 306-321, 2015.","title":"A comparative study of MIP and CP formulations for the B2B scheduling optimization problem","authors":"Gilles Pesant, Gregory Rix, Louis-Martin Rousseau","year":"2015","venue":"Proc. of CPAIOR 2015","doi":null,"url":null,"internal_url":null}],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}