A Decision Support System for Exposition Timetabling Using Ant Colony Optimization

The exposition industry has developed rapidly in recent years. For exposition centers, exposition timetabling is a complicated problem. The timetables arranged by the administrators usually result in an imbalanced usage percentage between showgrounds and a low total usage percentage for all showgrounds. In this paper, we developed a decision support system that considers the characteristics of exposition timetabling. The proposed system applies ant colony optimization for determining the near-optimal timetable of expositions. The ants are grouped into teams representing multi-layer ant paths for priority ranking. This improvement allows us to classify candidate expositions with different time preferences. The showground timetabling of an exposition center is used to validate the proposed system. The timetable proposed by the decision support system ensures a higher efficiency and a higher total usage percentage of the showgrounds than the timetable proposed by a human expert.