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The table placement problem: a research challenge at the EWI 2007

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Abstract

The table placement problem consists in deciding how to seat the participants attending a social lunch or dinner so that the total social benefit of the event is maximum. Four different approaches are presented: a linear model, a bin-packing-based-approach, a quadratic assignment problem, and a greedy heuristic. The different formulations are computationally compared over a set of artificial instances and on the real data for the EURO Winter Institute 2007 Gala dinner.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees and the associate editor for their comments which helped to improve the final version of this paper.

Valentina Cacchiani gratefully acknowledges the financial support of DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy.

Sergio García’s research has been funded by Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica (I+D+I) (project MTM2009-14039-C06-04 and RDEF funds), Fundación Séneca (project 02911/PI/05), and Comunidad de Madrid (project CCG07-UC3M/ESP-3389).

Lieselot Vanhaverbeke gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) through the research project OZR1067.

We are very grateful to the authors of Fernandes-Muritiba et al. (2010) for providing us with their code to solve the Bin-Packing Problem with Conflicts.

Finally, we would like to thank the organizers of the EURO Winter Institute 2007 and all the laureates, who helped a lot with their fruitful discussions during the course. We would like to thank specially Frank Plastria, who launched the idea of the joint research activity, and Francisco Saldanha, who was the main organizer of the Institute. Moreover, the comments and suggestions from both of them were invaluable for improving this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Estadística, University Carlos III, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911, Leganés, Spain

    Sergio García

  2. DEIS, University of Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Valentina Cacchiani

  3. MOSI, Dept. of Math., O.R., Stat. and Inf. Syst. for Management, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Lieselot Vanhaverbeke

  4. Energy Sector, Solar & Hydro Division, Photovoltaics, E X PV EMEA SM, Siemens AG, Hugo-Junkers-Str. 15-17, 90411, Nuremberg, Germany

    Martin Bischoff

Authors
  1. Sergio García
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  2. Valentina Cacchiani
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  3. Lieselot Vanhaverbeke
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  4. Martin Bischoff
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Correspondence to Sergio García.

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García, S., Cacchiani, V., Vanhaverbeke, L. et al. The table placement problem: a research challenge at the EWI 2007. TOP 22, 208–226 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11750-012-0249-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11750-012-0249-5

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