Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Nicholas G. Hall (The
Ohio State University).
The title is "Dynamic Opponent Choice in Tournaments".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, September 15 at 13:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09>
Meeting ID: 991 8064 1475
Passcode: 994980
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
We propose an alternative design for tournaments that use a preliminary
stage, followed by several rounds of single elimination play. Most U.S.
major sports, for example, are organized in this way. However, the
conventional "bracket" design of these tournaments suffers from several
deficiencies. First, top ranked players randomly incur unfortunate
matchups against other players, which introduces an unnecessary element
of luck. Second, as documented in the tournament design literature,
various reasonable criteria such as stronger ranked players having a
higher probability of winning, are not satisfied. Third, the probability
that the top two players meet is not maximized. Fourth, there is the
widely observed issue of shirking at the preliminary stage, where a
player loses deliberately to obtain an easier path through the
tournament. Finally, the use of a conventional fixed bracket fails to
allow players to consider information that develops during the
tournament, such as injuries to other players. To address all these
issues, we allow higher ranked players at the single elimination stage
to choose their next opponent at each round. We allow each player's
ranking either to remain static, or to improve from beating a higher
ranked player. Using data from 1,902 men's professional tennis
tournaments from 2001-2016, we demonstrate the reasonableness of the
results obtained. We also perform sensitivity analysis for the effect of
increasing irregularity in the pairwise win probability matrix on three
traditional performance measures. Finally, we show that our opponent
choice design reduces shirking, and could have eliminated it in some
notorious situations. In summary, compared with the conventional design,
the opponent choice design provides higher probabilities that the best
player wins and also that the two best players meet, reduces shirking,
and performs well for preservation of ranking.
The next talk in our series will be given by
Leah Epstein (University of Haifa) | September 29 | The benefit of
preemption.
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Nicholas G. Hall (The
Ohio State University).
The title is "Dynamic Opponent Choice in Tournaments".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, September 15 at 13:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09>
Meeting ID: 991 8064 1475
Passcode: 994980
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
We propose an alternative design for tournaments that use a preliminary
stage, followed by several rounds of single elimination play. Most U.S.
major sports, for example, are organized in this way. However, the
conventional "bracket" design of these tournaments suffers from several
deficiencies. First, top ranked players randomly incur unfortunate
matchups against other players, which introduces an unnecessary element
of luck. Second, as documented in the tournament design literature,
various reasonable criteria such as stronger ranked players having a
higher probability of winning, are not satisfied. Third, the probability
that the top two players meet is not maximized. Fourth, there is the
widely observed issue of shirking at the preliminary stage, where a
player loses deliberately to obtain an easier path through the
tournament. Finally, the use of a conventional fixed bracket fails to
allow players to consider information that develops during the
tournament, such as injuries to other players. To address all these
issues, we allow higher ranked players at the single elimination stage
to choose their next opponent at each round. We allow each player's
ranking either to remain static, or to improve from beating a higher
ranked player. Using data from 1,902 men's professional tennis
tournaments from 2001-2016, we demonstrate the reasonableness of the
results obtained. We also perform sensitivity analysis for the effect of
increasing irregularity in the pairwise win probability matrix on three
traditional performance measures. Finally, we show that our opponent
choice design reduces shirking, and could have eliminated it in some
notorious situations. In summary, compared with the conventional design,
the opponent choice design provides higher probabilities that the best
player wins and also that the two best players meet, reduces shirking,
and performs well for preservation of ranking.
The next talk in our series will be given by
Leah Epstein (University of Haifa) | September 29 | The benefit of
preemption.
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Andrea Schaerf
<http://www.dpia.uniud.it/schaerf/> (University of Udine).
The title is "Educational Timetabling: Problems, Benchmarks, Algorithms,
and Practical Issues".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, July 7 at 13:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/98579414742?pwd=enQxM2wveUowQ3BZenB1QURKVStadz09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/98579414742?pwd=enQxM2wveUowQ3BZenB1QURKVStadz09>
Meeting ID: 985 7941 4742
Passcode: 361848
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
Educational timetabling problems consist in scheduling a sequence of
events (lectures, seminars, or exams) involving teachers and students in
a prefixed period of time, satisfying a set of constraints of various
types. In this talk, we critically review different formulations, public
datasets, and search methods. In particular, we illustrate local search
methods, their parameter tuning procedure, and their results. Finally,
we discuss practical issues involved in the actual solution of
timetabling problems.
The next talk in our series will be in September, stay tuned.
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Mike Carter
<https://che.utoronto.ca/professor-michael-w-carter/> (University of
Toronto).
The title is " Challenges in Healthcare Scheduling Applications".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, June 23 at 13:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93477049829?pwd=aE1lVjFyS1ZpQkdxRno2cVptSVdqUT09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93477049829?pwd=aE1lVjFyS1ZpQkdxRno2cVptSVdqUT09>
Meeting ID: 934 7704 9829
Passcode: 866135
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
In the immortal words of Monty Python, “… and now for something
completely different!” Over the past three decades, I have spent much of
my time working on practical healthcare applications. Typically, the
projects are done with healthcare collaborators. Virtually all of the
scheduling problems are highly stochastic, and scheduling approaches
focus on managing variability. In this talk, I will describe several
healthcare applications including: diagnostic imaging, cancer treatment
(chemotherapy and radiation), nurse/physician scheduling, surgical
scheduling, 911 call centres, home care routing, medical resident
scheduling and primary care appointments (e.g. advanced access). In each
case, I will describe the underlying uncertainties and briefly review
recent approaches.
The next talk in our series will be given by
Andrea Schaerf (University of Udine) | July 7 | Educational Timetabling:
Problems, Benchmarks, Algorithms, and Practical Issues.
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Jinjiang Yuan (Zhengzhou
Uni).
The title is "Updated complexity results in single-machine
primary-secondary scheduling for minimizing two regular criteria".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, June 9 at 13:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/96998490212?pwd=Zm5QTXdTcnYyeVh5NytCb3NvNUpmUT09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/96998490212?pwd=Zm5QTXdTcnYyeVh5NytCb3NvNUpmUT09>
Meeting ID: 969 9849 0212
Passcode: 556764
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
In the primary-secondary scheduling problem, we have a primary
scheduling criterion and a secondary scheduling criterion. The goal of
the problem is to find a schedule which minimizes the second criterion,
subject to the restriction that the primary criterion is minimized. Lee
and Vairaktarakis [LV1993] presented a comprehensive review for the
computational complexity of the single-machine primary-secondary
scheduling problems, where all the jobs are released at time zero. When
both of the two criteria are regular, more than twenty problems were
posed as open in [LV1993]. This talk will report the research progress
of these open problems.
The next seminar in our series will be given by Mike Carter
<https://che.utoronto.ca/professor-michael-w-carter/>
(Uni of Toronto) "Challenges in Healthcare Scheduling Applications" and
it will be held on June 23 at 13:00 UTC. For more details, please visit
https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Erik Demeulemeester (KU
Leuven).
The title is "On the State of the Art in Proactive/Reactive Project
Scheduling".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, May 26 at 13:00 UTC.
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93810859740?pwd=T3Z6d3hZSDM2UnFDRVQrMi9YMnY5Zz09
Meeting ID: 938 1085 9740
Passcode: 021060
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
The majority of publications in the extensive literature on
resource-constrained project scheduling focus on a static deterministic
setting for which a so-called baseline schedule is computed prior to
project execution. In the real world, however, a project may be subject
to considerable uncertainty. During the actual execution of a project,
the baseline schedule may indeed suffer from disruptive events, causing
the actually realized activity start times to deviate from the predicted
baseline start times. This presentation focuses on robust project
scheduling, in particular the development of effective and efficient
proactive and reactive scheduling procedures. Proactive scheduling aims
at generating robust baseline schedules that carry sufficient protection
against possible schedule disruptions that may occur during project
execution. Reactive scheduling procedures aim at repairing the baseline
schedule when the built-in protection fails during the execution of the
project. We discuss the fundamentals of state of the art
proactive/reactive project scheduling approaches and discuss key
directions for future research.
The next seminar in our series will be given by Jinjiang Yuan (Zhengzhou
Univ.) "Updated complexity results in single-machine primary-secondary
scheduling for minimizing two regular criteria" and it will be held on
June 9 at 13:00 UTC. For more details please visit
https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Martin Skutella (TU Berlin).
The title is "Efficient Algorithms and Provably Good Solutions for
NP-hard Scheduling Problems".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, May 12 at 13:00 UTC:
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/97275617228?pwd=R3ZEMlhialpFSlBUcUo2NEVmS214dz09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/97275617228?pwd=R3ZEMlhialpFSlBUcUo2NEVmS214dz09>
Meeting ID: 972 7561 7228
Passcode: 672344
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
Machine scheduling problems are among the first optimization problems
for which approximation algorithms have been analyzed. An approximation
algorithm is a polynomial-time algorithm which always finds a feasible
solution whose objective function value is within an a priori known
factor (performance ratio) of the optimum solution value. In this talk
we focus on identical parallel machine scheduling with total weighted
completion time objective. We present, among other things, a refined
analysis of the performance ratio for the weighted shortest processing
time first (WSPT) rule. This is joint work with Sven Jäger.
The next seminar in our series will be given by Erik Demeulemeester
(FEB-KBI, KU Leuven) "On the State of the Art in Proactive/Reactive
Project Scheduling" and it will be held on May 26 at 13:00 UTC. For more
details please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the talk given by Lixin Tang (Northeastern
Uni, Shenyang).
The title is "Data Analytics and Optimization for Production, Logistics
and Energy Scheduling".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, April 28 at 13:00 UTC.
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93613611791?pwd=QlRuZitWcU9tb1dTNGorUGtab1MyUT09
Meeting ID: 936 1361 1791
Passcode: 193553
The number of participants on Zoom is limited. Therefore, you can follow
the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
This talk discusses some interesting topics on scheduling and data
analytics of production, logistics and energy in the steel industry,
including: 1) production batching and scheduling in
steelmaking/continuous casting, and hot/cold rolling operations; 2)
logistics scheduling in storage/stowage, shuffling, transportation and
(un)loading operations; 3) energy optimization including energy
allocation, coordinated planning and scheduling of production and
energy; 4) data based analytics, including dynamic analytics of BOF
steelmaking process based on multi-stage modeling; temperature
prediction of blast furnace; temperature prediction of molten iron in
transportation process; energy analytics for estimation, prediction of
generation and consumption, diagnosis and benchmarking; temperature
prediction of reheat furnace based on mechanism and data; strip quality
analytics of continuous annealing based on multi-objective ensemble
learning; process monitoring and diagnosis of continuous annealing based
on mechanism and data.
The next seminar in our series will be given by Martin Skutella (TU
Berlin) "Efficient Algorithms and Provably Good Solutions for NP-hard
Scheduling Problems" and it will be held on Wednesday, May 12 at 13:00
UTC. For more details please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the second seminar in our new Scheduling
Seminars Series (see https://schedulingseminar.com/ ). It will be given
by Mor Harchol-Balter (Carnegie Mellon University).
The title is "Recent Breakthroughs in Stochastic Scheduling Theory".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, April 14 at 13:00 UTC.
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/96341182746?pwd=MTFsNDE0V01UK091ZVdLdEVNN0JaQT09
Meeting ID: 963 4118 2746
Passcode: 898539
The number of participants on Zoom is limited. Therefore, you can follow
the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
This talk considers stochastic scheduling, where job sizes and arrival
times are drawn from a distribution. As empirical job size variability
has skyrocketed, stochastic scheduling research has grown increasingly
important. What scheduling policies should we use to keep response times
low? How should we schedule when job sizes are unknown or only partially
known? What scheduling policies should we use in a multi-server (M/G/k)
setting, as compared with a single-server (M/G/1) setting? How can we
analyze the response times of scheduling policies in single-server and
multi-server settings? In this talk, we discuss recent breakthroughs
over the last 3 years in the area of stochastic scheduling. These
include: (1) The SOAP scheduling framework, which greatly expands the
class of scheduling policies whose response times we can now analyze in
the M/G/1 setting. (2) The first response time analysis of common
scheduling policies in the M/G/k. (3) Asymptotically optimal scheduling
in the M/G/k. Joint work with: Ziv Scully, Isaac Grosof
The third seminar in our series will be given by Lixin Tang
(NorthEastern University in ShenYang, China) "Data Analytics and
Optimization for Production, Logistics, and Energy Scheduling" and it
will be held on April 28 at 13:00 UTC.
For more information, please visit our webpage
https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua
Dear scheduling researcher,
We are delighted to announce the first seminar in our new Scheduling
Seminars Series (see https://schedulingseminar.com/ ). It will be given
by Jan Karel Lenstra (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam) and
David Shmoys (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY). The title is "Elements of
scheduling".
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, March 31 at 13:00 UTC.
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93174548631?pwd=YWlkOXcvQUFZTllPUHdUQ3pPVmkzZz09
Meeting ID: 931 7454 8631
Passcode: 488880
The questions will be managed using sli.do #141421
The number of participants on Zoom is limited. Therefore, you can follow
the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
J.K. Lenstra and D. Shmoys were invited by Michael Pinedo (New York
University) to give the talk, whose abstract follows.
During the 1970’s, the area of scheduling developed from a hodge-podge
of isolated results into a unified theory. Over the past decades, it has
grown to a mature and lively area, which is a meeting point of
operations research, mathematics and computer science, and at the same
time a sound basis for the allocation of scarce resources to activities
over time in many practical situations. We will sketch the early
development of scheduling theory, and also discuss the integration of
ideas from online analysis, stochastic models, and machine learning in
response to the needs of a changing society.
The second seminar in our series will be given by Mor Harchol-Balter
(CMU) in "Recent breakthroughs in stochastic scheduling analysis" and
it will be on April 14 at 13:00 UTC.
With kind regards
Zdenek, Mike and Guohua