Graduate Visit Scheduler

Mixed integer optimization-based scheduler for visitor-faculty meetings at department recruitment events. Created by Alex Dowling and Jeff Kantor at the University of Notre Dame.

Motivation

Many graduate programs host recruitment visits where prospective students meet faculty one-on-one or in small groups. Building schedules by hand is difficult because preferences, availability, group limits, room/building constraints, and break/travel windows all interact.

This project packages the scheduling workflow used for graduate recruitment at Notre Dame CBE as an open-source Python tool. Under the hood, it builds and solves a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) in Pyomo.

Workflow

The scheduler takes three input files:

Faculty catalog YAML (faculty metadata, areas, status, building/room).
Run configuration YAML (building slots, break slots, availability constraints, weights).
Visitor preferences CSV (ranked faculty choices and research area interests).

Outputs include:

Optimized visitor-faculty assignments.
Faculty-view and visitor-view schedule plots.
Optional DOCX exports of individualized visitor schedules.

Scheduling Example

The documentation includes a realistic worked example with 10 visitors, 6 faculty, two buildings (ABC and XYZ), three topic areas (Energy, Bio, Theory), and several faculty scheduling conflicts.

Visitor-view schedule:

Visitor Schedule Example

Faculty-view schedule:

Faculty Schedule Example

How to interpret these schedules:

ABC and XYZ are building abbreviations from the run config. The box color (blue versus green) also indicates the building.
In visitor-view plots, labels are Faculty (Building) for multi-building schedules and just Faculty for single-building schedules. Blank slots indicate breaks or travel windows.
In faculty-view plots, the number in parentheses next to each faculty name is that faculty member’s total number of scheduled meetings. Single-building schedules omit the redundant building name.

Full setup, model details, and solver outputs are documented in Quickstart and Mathematical Formulation.

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