Development of the genetic algorithm based conference session schedule program

Academic conferences are a scientific activity where scientific developments are presented and discussed. Academic conferences are multidisciplinary because they allow for more than one science field study. Multidisciplinary conferences allow the presentation of studies in different disciplines such as natural science, social sciences, health, and art sciences. To organize multidisciplinary conferences, it is necessary to set days, halls and sessions, and presentations of all sessions according to the relevant main discipline. One of the most important expectations of the conference listener is that all the papers in a session are composed of studies in the same area. Thanks to this requirement, the participants will not have to listen to studies that are not of their interest in a strict hall but only to papers of their interest. Having presentations from different disciplines in the same session during the conference is a big problem for conference participants. With this thesis, the solution to the scheduling problem of multidisciplinary conferences has been realized with the Genetic Algorithm and Epigenetic Algorithm approach. The basic concepts of the Genetic Algorithm and Epigenetic Algorithm are given and conference scheduling schemes and the elements to be considered in scheduling are specified. Two different multidisciplinary conference data sets were used for this thesis. With the Genetic Algorithm and Epigenetic Algorithm, an application has been developed in C# language under different days, sessions, and some restrictions on different rooms. As a result of the study, the charts obtained with the Genetic Algorithm and Epigenetic Algorithm are given. The Epigenetic Algorithm has been observed to give more successful results compared to the Genetic Algorithm.