Operations Research

Maximising Meeting Schedules

Client: Tourism Australia (Australian Tourist Commission)

The tourism industry is worth over $15.5 billion a year in export earnings to Australia. To promote travel to our shores, the Tourism Australia holds several large-scale international trade events each year (see Business Tourism and Events at Tourism Australia). Thousands of meetings take place at these conventions between international buyers and sellers of Australian tourism products. CSIRO has developed a scheduler, a specialist software product, that arranges meeting times and places while allowing for the various constraints that need to be satisfied.

Billion of dollars worth of Australian tourism trade is negotiated at each Australian Tourism Exchange (ATE) convention. Given the large cost to the sellers of Australian tourism products and the time invested by the international buyers, the meetings must be carefully scheduled to satisfy the participants’ requirements. Moreover, the several million dollars it costs to host such a convention requires that these events be conducted efficiently.

Russell Pittaway of the Australian Tourist Commission and Dr Graham Mills of CSIRO discuss scheduling of trade event meetings. A new CSIRO scheduler optimally plans meetings between buyers and sellers of tourism products, ensuring the smooth running of tourism industry trade events and resulting in a stream of visitors to our shores.

Scheduler matches buyers and sellers

Prior to each convention, the ATC asks buyers to prioritise the sellers that they would like to meet, and sellers ranks the buyers. Each meeting in the convention has a fixed duration, say, fifteen minutes. Sellers have fixed booths and the buyers move between these as determined by their meeting schedule. Having completed one meeting, there is a restricted set of choices for the next meeting because the venue is typically large and moving between distant booths for consecutive meetings would waste meeting time.

The scheduler developed by CSIRO produces complete meeting schedules for the ATC. The new scheduler is a purpose-built software package, which requires various inputs, including the buyer and seller rankings, meal break times and the locations of seller booths. The software processes these inputs to create a schedule that:

• contains the most preferred seller-buyer meetings,
• creates full appointment schedules for sellers, and
• keeps consecutive appointments located close by.

The scheduler can be used in-house by ATC staff. Previously, information was sent to external consultants. It then took several weeks for a schedule to be returned. The CSIRO scheduler takes less than an hour to devise a schedule and is flexible enough to allow changes to be made quickly, for example if a buyer or seller can not attend. The scheduler gives the ATC complete control of the appointment scheduling process and keeps buyers and sellers happy, increasing the likelihood of repeat business. CSIRO has developed many other scheduling systems for a range of business contexts.

Client Feedback

"SATE has been introduced to schedule appointments at various events the ATC conducts. To date it has been used for appointment scheduling at ATE98, Darwin Walkabout, ITB98, Dream Time Holidays. The SATE Software is providing the ATC with schedules that have more meetings and better satisfaction for clents than the previous method that was used. Also, the processing time for SATE is significantly less than the previous method. With SATE we are in full control of scheduling meetings to ATC clients who are buyers and sellers of travel packages. The implementation of SATE will give the ATC greater flexibility and enhanced functionality in the preparation and conducting of trade events requiring appointment scheduling.": Russell Pittaway, Manager Marketing Information Database, Australian Tourist Commission, January 1999.

Latest Information

An updated version of CSIRO's scheduler was delivered to Tourism Australia in 2006, and it has been used every year since for scheduling meetings in their events.