Scheduling appointments at trade events for the Australian Tourist Commission

Many trade events include appointments between buyers and sellers. Each buyer indicates preferences for meetings and various sellers and vice versa. We developed an assignment model and implemented it in the SATE (scheduling appointments at trade events) software. SATE maximizes an objective that weights the preferences of buyers and sellers. Our assignment method schedules more meetings with higher preferences in less computational time than the previous method used. SATE allows organizers of trade events to control appointment scheduling and investigate various scenarios prior to publishing appointment schedules.