Subject: IETF Automatic Schedule Builder RFP

From: IETF Administration LLC Executive Director <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2019 12:02:03 -0700

The IETF Administration LLC (IETF LLC) is soliciting proposals ("Proposals") to
build an Automatic Scheduler for IETF and IRTF.  The RFP is located at:
https://ietf.org/about/administration/rfps/  

Please note the following timeline:

Timeline
13 Sep:	RFP Issued
20 Sep:	Questions and Inquiries deadline
23 Sep:	Answers to questions issued, RFP Addenda and Update issued
30 Sep:	Proposals due
07 Oct:	Selection made, negotiations begin
18 Oct:	Contract execution
28 Oct: Work begins

Overview 
There are roughly 130 Working Groups and Research Groups focusing on
different topics. Three times a year, around 100 of these working groups meet in
person for a week. The IETF Secretariat develops a schedule for these groups to 
meet in, ensuring the groups have rooms of appropriate size, the right resources,
and with appropriate meeting duration. The schedule development process 
minimizes conflicts between the meeting groups.

The goal of this project is to automatically produce one or more possible 
Schedules for the IETF Secretariat. These Schedules will ensure that the resources 
required exist in the Room into which each Session is scheduled. The Schedules
will also minimize the declared conflicts between groups scheduled at the same
time. The relative weights of the conflicts must be configurable, with the initial 
configuration prioritizing 1st priority conflicts higher than 2nd priority conflicts,
and 2nd priority conflicts higher than 3rd priority, and 3rd priority conflicts
higher than the people who must be present. (Note the relabelling of these
constraints for IETF 106. This project will be agnostic to that, simply working with
the Conflict types, with the initial configuration listed above. When the new 
Conflict types are added, the configuration this project provides will allow their
relative priorities to be configured).

This project will also provide a mechanism for the IETF Secretariat to capture the
constraints mentioned above that are not yet modeled, such as “SAAG always 
meets in the first afternoon session on Thursday”. These constraints will initially
have a priority configuration stronger than 1st priority conflicts.

Each produced Schedule should show a computed value that indicates the severity
of the set of remaining conflicts.

Please reply with questions, if any, and a bid if you are interested in pursuing this 
opportunity to [email-masked]. 

Thanks in advance.

Portia Wenze-Danley
IETF LLC Interim Executive Director