Scheduling of panels by integer programming: Results for the 2005 and 2006 New Orleans meetings

This note reports on the successful use of an integer-programming routine, whose details were delineated earlier, to assign panels to time slots in scheduling the annual meetings of the Public Choice Society in New Orleans in both 2005 and 2006. Each panel, or session, consists of three or four papers and belongs to a specific subject area. All submitted papers are grouped into panels in an initial step. The integer-programming routine then assigns these panels to the available time slots so as to satisfy certain constraints and, in addition, spread the panels in each subject area as evenly as possible across the time slots. Problems that arose, and possible solutions, are briefly discussed.