Optimization capacity planning problem on conference scheduling

Designing a conference scheduling involves various factors that need to be considered in order to fulfill the participants' preferences. Capacity planning problem is a main focus in this study in order to assign the papers that are to be presented into time slots based on paper of interest. All the presentation papers are assigned efficiently to avoid too many participants in a particular session. Goal Programming model has been developed to produce a schedule that maximizes the participants' satisfaction in terms of capacity planning subject to the capacity constraints. The proposed schedule shows that almost 93% of the time slots are fully utilized and fulfill the capacity constraint. Moreover, it could help the conference committee to better understand the preferences of participant prior to construct the schedule in future.