Inform College (IC) is planning a major government issues conference with panels on topics i = 1,c, 30. Panels will be scheduled in one of t = 1,c, 6 time blocks, with 5 running simultaneously in each block. To make the conference as convenient as possible, IC has surveyed prospective attendees and computed vales qi, i=!

the number of attendees who would particularly like to be able to attend both sessions i and i=.

Now IC would like to construct a session schedule that minimizes the total number of attendees inconvenienced by pairs of sessions they would like to attend running simultaneously.

(a) Formulate IC’s session scheduling task as a transportation problem analog of Quadradic Assignment model 11.16 , using decision variables xi, t !1 if panel i is scheduled in time block t and = 0 otherwise.

(b) Refer to Section 11.4 and Chapter 14 to justify solving the model heuristically using methods of this chapter because tractable exact solution is unlikely.

(c) Suppose now that the instance is to be solved approximately by Improving Search Algorithm 15B, beginning from a feasible schedule and using a pairwise swap move set to evaluate moves interchanging the current time assignment of a single pair of panels. Calculate the number of such moves at any current assignment xi, j. Also determine whether all the neighbors produced by such moves will be feasible.

(d) Repeat part

(c) using a single change move set that changes only the assigned time of a single panel.