The Court of Appeals of Virginia Uses Integer Programming and Cloud Computing to Schedule Sessions

Each spring, a deputy clerk of the Court of Appeals of Virginia manually schedules panel sessions and assigns judges to sessions for the following calendar year. The information technology department for the Supreme Court of Virginia, the head of the judicial branch of government in Virginia, also serves the Court of Appeals of Virginia. In the spring of 2010, the staff of the Court of Appeals of Virginia and the information technology staff contacted Virginia Commonwealth University to explore a computational approach to generating schedules. Together, we developed a tool that uses integer programming to generate schedules; we used the method to generate the 2011 schedule, resulting in savings of up to 150 hours of work annually. The schedule satisfies all the constraints required by the court by properly distributing panel sessions among its districts throughout the year. The court places great importance on its members not becoming parochial; to that end, judges sit in disparate panels to hear litigants, who convene in regions throughout the state, to ensure a more uniform application of the law. The court used industrial-strength integer programming software to generate the 2011 schedule at low cost by using resources available on the Cloud.