Abstract
We are given suppliers and customers, and a set of tables. Every evening of the forthcoming days, there will be a dinner. Each customer must eat with each supplier exactly once, but two suppliers may meet at most once at a table. The number of customers and the number of suppliers who can sit together at a table are bounded above by fixed parameters. What is the minimum number of evenings to be scheduled in order to reach this objective? This question was submitted by a firm to the Junior company of a French engineering school some years ago. Lower and upper bounds are given in this paper, as well as proven optimal solutions with closed-form expressions for some cases.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 173-188 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing |
| Volume | 97 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 May 2016 |
Keywords
- Howell designs
- Linear programming
- Meeting scheduling
- Optimization