Optimizing Career Day in three seconds

Since 2002, the Transportation and Logistics Society in the University of North Florida's Coggin College of Business has annually conducted Career Day, which in recent years has included over 200 one-on-one, 25-minute interviews conducted between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. during a single day. In 2007, Career Day involved 16 firms and 42 participating students, with each firm given 13 interview slots — creating 208 interview slots over the day — and each student getting as many as five interviews. In the past, the interview schedule was manually generated by a committee of students and faculty, necessitated 10+ hours to complete, inadvertently created occasional time conflicts for students and/or firms, and was sub-optimal in terms of firm and student preferences. In 2007, a pure binary integer linear program was employed, which assured no time conflicts for participants, optimized the combined preferences of interviewers and students, and constructed the schedule in three seconds.