Speaker
Description
At SPring-8, scheduling accepted user proposals has traditionally required extensive manual coordination by beamline staff, who must consider user availability, staff availability, beamline operation cycles, and compatibility of experimental setups. To address this challenge, we developed an automated proposal scheduling system based on 0-1 integer programming and deployed it for practical beamline operation.
The scheduler formulates proposal allocation as a combinatorial optimization problem and generates feasible schedule candidates under multiple operational constraints. At BL19B2, the system reduced schedule coordination time from more than one full day of manual work to a few hours, while improving consistency and reducing dependence on individual experience.
We also integrated the scheduler into a broader digital workflow for proposal management. Accepted proposal information, coordination results, and finalized schedules can be managed in a more continuous manner, and linkage with the User Support Database supports downstream registration and sharing of finalized schedules. This integration helps beamline staff manage proposal information more efficiently and provides a basis for future user-facing functions, such as web-based availability input.
This work demonstrates that proposal scheduling at synchrotron facilities can be treated not only as an optimization problem, but also as part of an integrated workflow for scalable and maintainable user experiment support.
