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Organising a social event: a difficult problem of combinatorial optimisation

Organising a social event: a difficult problem of combinatorial optimisation
Organising a social event: a difficult problem of combinatorial optimisation
This interesting problem arose in the context of organizing a "progressive party" at a yachting rally. Some yachts were to be designated hosts; the crews of the remaining yachts would then visit the hosts for six successive half-hour periods. A guest crew could not revisit the same host, and two guest crews could not meet more than once during the evening. Additional constraints were imposed by the capacities of the host yachts and the crew sizes of the guests. Although this problem has many of the classical features of combinatorial optimization problems, it does not belong to any previously known class of problem. Integer programming formulations which included all the constraints resulted in very large models and all attempts to find a solution failed. However by solving a simple relaxation of the problem using linear programming we obtained a lower bound for the solution, which combined with a feasible solution obtained (spectacularly easily) by constraint programming led to an optimal solution. We describe our computational experience and discuss the features of this problem which account for the failure and success of the two approaches.
0305-0548
845-856
Brailsford, S.C.
634585ff-c828-46ca-b33d-7ac017dda04f
Hubbard, P.M.
634585ff-c828-46ca-b33d-7ac017dda04f
Smith, B.M.
ad9c9ada-3609-4ef7-ae5e-9c2eb33b5c0f
Williams, H.P.
4f620625-0c8e-463a-85c0-703b05c83d27
Brailsford, S.C.
634585ff-c828-46ca-b33d-7ac017dda04f
Hubbard, P.M.
634585ff-c828-46ca-b33d-7ac017dda04f
Smith, B.M.
ad9c9ada-3609-4ef7-ae5e-9c2eb33b5c0f
Williams, H.P.
4f620625-0c8e-463a-85c0-703b05c83d27

Brailsford, S.C., Hubbard, P.M., Smith, B.M. and Williams, H.P. (1996) Organising a social event: a difficult problem of combinatorial optimisation. Computers and Operations Research, 23 (9), 845-856. (doi:10.1016/0305-0548(96)00001-9).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This interesting problem arose in the context of organizing a "progressive party" at a yachting rally. Some yachts were to be designated hosts; the crews of the remaining yachts would then visit the hosts for six successive half-hour periods. A guest crew could not revisit the same host, and two guest crews could not meet more than once during the evening. Additional constraints were imposed by the capacities of the host yachts and the crew sizes of the guests. Although this problem has many of the classical features of combinatorial optimization problems, it does not belong to any previously known class of problem. Integer programming formulations which included all the constraints resulted in very large models and all attempts to find a solution failed. However by solving a simple relaxation of the problem using linear programming we obtained a lower bound for the solution, which combined with a feasible solution obtained (spectacularly easily) by constraint programming led to an optimal solution. We describe our computational experience and discuss the features of this problem which account for the failure and success of the two approaches.

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More information

Published date: 1996
Organisations: Management

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 36302
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/36302
ISSN: 0305-0548
PURE UUID: 9f14a985-f345-4a00-ae0b-1c8275698711
ORCID for S.C. Brailsford: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-8230
ORCID for P.M. Hubbard: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-8230

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 01 Aug 2006
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 02:41

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Contributors

Author: S.C. Brailsford ORCID iD
Author: P.M. Hubbard ORCID iD
Author: B.M. Smith
Author: H.P. Williams

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