Abstract
Humans are social animals and usually organize activities in groups. However, they are often willing to split temporarily a bigger group in subgroups to enhance their preferences. In this work we present NightSplitter, an on-line tool that is able to plan movie and dinner activities for a group of users, possibly splitting them in subgroups to optimally satisfy their preferences. We first model and prove that this problem is NP-complete. We then use Constraint Programming (CP) or alternatively Simulated Annealing (SA) to solve it. Empirical results show the feasibility of the approach even for big cities where hundreds of users can select among hundreds of movies and thousand of restaurants.
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Notes
- 1.
Currently preferences are visible to all the users. However, mechanisms to hide the individual preferences such as differential privacy [8] are under consideration.
- 2.
We are developing the tool for commercial use.
- 3.
Specifically, the rating value of activity ranges from 0 to 5, where 0 means “no rating information is given”.
- 4.
Public preferences are useful to break the ties when users have very general individual preferences (e.g., I like all the movies).
- 5.
The decision version of the problem requires the “greater or equal” operator. Similar to the theorem presented in [4], our theorem holds because the sum of the preferences is never greater than V.
- 6.
We selected these solvers based on the recent results of the MiniZinc Challenge 2016 [27]. In particular Or-Tools won a golden medal in the Fixed category and HCSP won a golden medal in Free and Parallel category. Chuffed was the second best solver of the entire Challenge after LCG-Glucose-free which is not publicly available. We would remark also that our problem instances have been submitted to the incoming MiniZinc Challenge 2017 [28].
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Liu, T., Di Cosmo, R., Gabbrielli, M., Mauro, J. (2017). NightSplitter: A Scheduling Tool to Optimize (Sub)group Activities. In: Beck, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66158-2_24
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