Constraint solving approaches to the business-to-business meeting scheduling problem (extended 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. This 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.