A prototypic model for scheduling courses at the Naval Postgraduate School

This thesis develops a prototypic integer programming model to aid in solving the Naval Postgraduate School academic course scheduling problem. The simplified model schedules faculty members to teach their assigned courses in specific rooms at specific times and schedules groups of students to the courses they have requested. The model assures, as best possible, that room capacity is no exceeded, students and faculty have time for lunch and faculty requesting 'back-to-back' courses are accommodated. To make the problem manageable, we concentrate on just one building, Glasgow Hall, and three departments, Operations Research, Mathematics and National Security Affairs. Even doing this, the model generated in GAMS (Generalized Algebraic Modeling System) has about 287,778 variables and 148,161 constraints and is too large to solve. Consequently, a simplified model, restricted to the Operations Research Department, is solved. This problem encompasses 19 faculty members, 26 courses, 83 sections and 11 classrooms. The model has less than 32,000 variables and 17, 000 constraints and is solved using GAMS and the X-System on an Amdahl 8995-700A in 3488.4 seconds.
http://archive.org/details/aprototypicmodel1094539763
Major, Chinese Army
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