Cruise companies can greatly benefit from offering passengers well-curated touristic recommendations and itineraries that maximize their experience while ensuring they return to the ship on time. However, from the perspective of the city hall, it's important to achieve a more even distribution of visitors across the city to avoid overcrowding. According to Bergen’s urbanization plan, there are specific areas where it is preferable to direct visitors to support urban development, social welfare, and environmental sustainability.
The challenge of balancing these interests can be modeled as a unique case of the Open Shop Scheduling Problem, a notoriously complex scheduling issue. The difficulty lies in the vast search space, as the almost unlimited combination possibilities create an overwhelming number of options. As a result, exact mathematical solutions using state-of-the-art algorithms have proven ineffective. Instead, the literature has explored alternative approaches, primarily focusing on meta-heuristics to tackle this problem.
The proposed reading course will address the complexity of scheduling problems and provide an overview of algorithms and meta-heuristics used to solve large instances of such problems.