# Collective Schedules: Scheduling Meets Computational Social Choice

## TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of collective schedules, extending social choice tools to scheduling problems involving shared preferences, analyzing their computational complexity and demonstrating practical solutions.

## Contribution

It formalizes collective scheduling, adapts social choice methods to it, and studies the computational complexity and practical solvability of finding optimal schedules.

## Key findings

- Optimal collective schedules can be computed for realistic instance sizes.
- Extends social choice rules like Kemeny and Condorcet to scheduling.
- Computational complexity results highlight challenges in finding schedules.

## Abstract

When scheduling public works or events in a shared facility one needs to accommodate preferences of a population. We formalize this problem by introducing the notion of a collective schedule. We show how to extend fundamental tools from social choice theory---positional scoring rules, the Kemeny rule and the Condorcet principle---to collective scheduling. We study the computational complexity of finding collective schedules. We also experimentally demonstrate that optimal collective schedules can be found for instances with realistic sizes.