Conf Schedule Optimization

Conference Schedule Optimization

Choosing what to attend is a constrained optimization problem, and treating it as one is what separates a real schedule from a wishlist. Events are variables; time slots are their domain; hard constraints (you cannot be in two rooms at once, you need minutes to walk between them, a capped workshop may be full, you said you must catch the opening keynote) define what is feasible; and a weighted objective over the feasible plans defines what is good. The output is the best feasible plan plus an honest account of what it could not decide and what it gave up to score well.

The objective is genuinely multi-term and the terms are in real conflict: maximizing interest fights breadth (seeing across themes), both fight pacing (a day of six back-to-back talks with fifteen-minute gaps is worse than five with a real break), and all three fight serendipity (deliberately leaving room for the unplanned good thing). You do not resolve this by pretending one term dominates. You jointly optimize a weighted sum whose weights are the attendee's — handed over from the preference profile, never invented here.

Two disciplines keep it honest. Conflict-surfacing: when two talks overlap and both score high and the profile cannot break the tie, the system flags it for the person rather than quietly choosing — that flag is the natural output of a model that tracks its own uncertainty. And the Goodhart caution: any score you optimize produces a substitution effect somewhere the score did not name (optimize raw interest and you quietly sacrifice breaks; optimize breadth and you skip the one talk they cared about most). So the weights stay user-owned, the conflicts get surfaced, and the schedule reports what it traded away.

The output (schedule contract)

{
  "generated_on": "YYYY-MM-DD",
  "method": "greedy-local-search | ilp",
  "selections": [
    {
      "day": "YYYY-MM-DD", "start": "HH:MM", "end": "HH:MM",
      "event_id": "...", "room": "...",
      "score": 0.0, "why": "why this won its slot",
      "alternatives": [ { "event_id": "...", "score": 0.0, "why_not": "why it lost / is recorded / lower affinity" } ]
    }
  ],
  "free_blocks": [ { "day": "YYYY-MM-DD", "start": "HH:MM", "end": "HH:MM", "purpose": "break | buffer | travel | meal" } ],
  "objective_breakdown": {
    "interest": 0.0, "breadth": 0.0, "pacing": 0.0, "serendipity": 0.0,
    "total": 0.0, "weights": { "interest": 0.0, "breadth": 0.0, "pacing": 0.0, "serendipity": 0.0 }
  },
  "unresolved_conflicts": [
    {
      "day": "YYYY-MM-DD", "slot": "HH:MM-HH:MM",
      "candidates": ["event_id_a", "event_id_b"],
      "why_unbreakable": "both score within epsilon; profile does not rank them",
      "needs": "your decision"
    }
  ],
  "constraints_applied": { "travel_time": "...", "capacity": "...", "hard_constraints": ["..."] },
  "tradeoffs_note": "what the chosen weighting sacrificed (the Goodhart honesty line)"
}

Common Patterns

Pattern 1: Formulate it as a COP — hard vs soft

Separate the two kinds of rule cleanly:

• Hard constraints (feasibility — never violated): no two selections overlap in time; consecutive selections in different rooms are separated by at least the room-to-room travel time (from config); a capacity_constrained session counts only if the attendee can realistically get a seat; and the attendee's own hard_constraints from the profile (must-attends are forced in; blackouts/kept-free blocks are forced out).
• Soft objective (quality — maximized): the weighted sum below.

A plan that violates a hard constraint is not a worse plan, it is not a plan. Filter first, optimize second.

Pattern 2: The weighted objective — four terms in tension

Score a candidate plan as w_interest·Interest + w_breadth·Breadth + w_pacing·Pacing + w_serendipity·Serendipity, with the ws from the profile:

• Interest — sum of the attendee's interest (via theme affinities × region) over selected talks. The "see what I care about" term.
• Breadth — coverage across distinct themes (diminishing returns on the 4th talk in one theme). The "don't tunnel" term.
• Pacing — rewards contiguous free time and penalizes fragmentation: a plan with one real 90-minute break beats one with six scattered 15-minute gaps, even at equal talk count. Also penalizes variance from preferred times and excess travel.
• Serendipity — rewards deliberately leaving slack and including the occasional outlier/exploration pick, so the plan is not a maximally-packed interest machine.

Pattern 3: Maximize contiguous free time, not just minimize gaps

Anti-fragmentation deserves its own emphasis because it is the easiest thing to get wrong. Six non-adjacent talks with fifteen-minute gaps is a worse day than the same six clustered with a genuine break — the human needs contiguous recovery, hallway conversations, and food. Model free time as blocks, reward the longest contiguous block, and treat a real break as a first-class good in the objective, not as leftover space.

Pattern 4: Surface unbreakable conflicts — do not silently pick

When two (or more) talks overlap, both score within an epsilon of each other, and the profile gives no basis to rank them, flag it in unresolved_conflicts with both candidates and why the model cannot break the tie. Do not flip a coin and hide it. This is the honest output of a system that knows both talks score high and that its model of the person cannot settle it alone — exactly the moment to hand the decision back. (When the profile does break the tie, pick, and record the loser in alternatives with a why_not.)

Pattern 5: Solve with greedy + local search by default, ILP when available

• Default (no solver deps): greedy seed (best feasible pick per slot, chronologically) then local search — swap/insert/remove moves that improve the weighted objective while staying feasible. Fast, transparent, good enough for a few-hundred-event program. This is what resources/schedule.py implements with numpy/pandas/networkx only.
• Exact (optional): formulate as an ILP and solve with pulp/ortools when installed and an optimum is wanted. Document the upgrade; do not require it.

Record which ran in method.

Pattern 6: Report the trade-off (Goodhart honesty)

Whatever the weights, the plan sacrificed something the weights under-counted. State it in tradeoffs_note: "Weighted toward interest, so day 2 is dense and breaks are short" or "Paced/breadth weighting means your single highest-interest talk was dropped for coverage." Naming the substitution is the antidote to optimizing a proxy and pretending it was the goal.

Workflow

□ Step 1: Load events.json, affinities.json, profile.json; load rooms + travel matrix + day bounds from config.
□ Step 2: Force in the profile's must-attends; force out blackouts/kept-free blocks.
□ Step 3: Build feasibility: per slot, the set of events that do not overlap, respect travel time,
          and are seatable (capacity).
□ Step 4: Score each event for the attendee (affinity × region interest, depth/format fit).
□ Step 5: Greedy-seed a feasible plan; run local search to maximize the user-weighted objective.
□ Step 6: Detect overlaps where top candidates tie within epsilon and the profile can't rank them ->
          unresolved_conflicts (do not auto-pick).
□ Step 7: Compute free_blocks (reward the longest contiguous block) and objective_breakdown.
□ Step 8: Write schedule.json + schedule.md (day-by-day) + conflicts.md (decisions) + rationale.md
          (picks, objective_breakdown, tradeoffs_note). Return the schedule.json path.

Guardrails

1. The weights are the user's

Danger: A hard-coded weighting silently sets the schedule's whole character. Guardrail: Read objective_weights from the profile. Never invent or override them. Red flag: A default weight vector compiled into the optimizer.

2. Surface conflicts, don't hide them

Danger: A silent coin-flip on two high-value talks looks like a confident decision it isn't. Guardrail: Tie within epsilon + profile can't rank ⇒ unresolved_conflicts, not a pick.

3. Protect contiguous free time

Danger: A maximally-packed day reads as "optimal" and burns the human out. Guardrail: Reward the longest contiguous free block; treat a real break as a first-class objective term.

4. Goodhart — report the substitution

Danger: Optimizing one proxy quietly sacrifices an unnamed good. Guardrail: State what the weighting traded away in tradeoffs_note.

5. Hard constraints are inviolable

Danger: A high-scoring plan that double-books a room or skips a must-attend. Guardrail: Filter to feasible before optimizing; force must-attends in, blackouts out.

6. No silent truncation; don't re-elicit or execute

Danger: Capping candidates or writing to a calendar without saying so. Guardrail: Log any caps. Do not change the profile. Calendar export only on explicit instruction.

Quick Reference

Hard constraints

Soft objective terms

Method choice

Related Skills

• conf-preference-elicitation: supplies the region, axis preferences, weights, and hard constraints that parameterize this optimization.
• conf-theme-clustering: supplies the affinities used for the interest and breadth terms.
• decision-matrix: a structured way to present a surfaced conflict's candidates to the human.
• expected-value: for weighing a capacity-risky workshop (might be full) against a guaranteed alternative.
• systems-thinking-leverage: the Goodhart/substitution lens that motivates tradeoffs_note.

Examples in Context

Example 1: A surfaced conflict

Day 2, 11:10–11:30 has two talks scoring 0.81 and 0.79 — one on Agents, one on Retrieval, both close to the attendee's interests, and the profile does not rank Agents over Retrieval. The optimizer does not pick. It writes an unresolved_conflicts entry naming both and "both within epsilon; profile does not rank these themes," needs: your decision. The person settles it in one line; the schedule never pretended it had.

Example 2: Paced beats packed at equal interest

Two feasible plans tie on interest. Plan A: six talks, gaps of 15–20 minutes all afternoon. Plan B: five talks plus one contiguous 80-minute afternoon block. With the attendee's pacing-leaning weights, Plan B scores higher — the long break is a modeled good, not wasted space — and tradeoffs_note records that one lower-interest talk was dropped to buy the break, which is exactly the trade the person asked for.