CoSPLib - A Benchmark Library for Conference Scheduling Problems

Conference scheduling problems require the generation of schedules for conferences by considering multiple constraints to offer the best possible experience to participants. Previous studies have been published in the literature, however, the comparison and evaluation of the developed methods is challenging, as these methods have been designed to address rather specific requirements of the conferences being studied per se. In this work, we attempt to bridge this gap by making benchmark data publicly available to researchers. We also present a selection hyper-heuristic algorithm to solve the benchmark instances and provide computational results. We aim to raise awareness of the under-studied conference scheduling problem, and to encourage researchers to contribute to the benchmark dataset with new instances, constraints, and solving methods.