Collective Schedules: Scheduling Meets Computational Social Choice

Abstract

When scheduling public works or events in a shared facility one needs to accommodate preferences of a population. We formalize this problem by introducing the notion of a collective schedule. We show how to extend fundamental tools from social choice theory---positional scoring rules, the Kemeny rule and the Condorcet principle---to collective scheduling. We study the computational complexity of finding collective schedules. We also experimentally demonstrate that optimal collective schedules can be found for instances with realistic sizes.