The generalized balanced academic curriculum problem with heterogeneous classes

We propose an extension of the Generalized Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem (GBACP), a relevant planning problem arising in many universities. The problem consists of assigning courses to teaching terms and years, satisfying a set of precedence constraints and balancing students’ load among term...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of operations research 2014-07, Vol.218 (1), p.147-163
Main Authors: Ceschia, Sara, Di Gaspero, Luca, Schaerf, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Balancing
Business and Management
Colleges & universities
Combinatorics
Core curriculum
Curricula
Curriculum planning
Education
Heuristic programming
Integer programming
Management
Methods
Operations research
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Planning
Precedence constraints
Scheduling
Scheduling (Management)
Searching
Solution space
Students
Studies
Theory of Computation
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Summary:We propose an extension of the Generalized Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem (GBACP), a relevant planning problem arising in many universities. The problem consists of assigning courses to teaching terms and years, satisfying a set of precedence constraints and balancing students’ load among terms. Differently from the original GBACP formulation, in our case, the same course can be assigned to different years for different curricula (i.e., the predetermined sets of courses from which a student can choose), leading to a more complex solution space. The problem is tackled by both Integer Programming (IP) methods and combinations of metaheuristics based on local search. The experimental analysis shows that the best results are obtained by means of a two-stage metaheuristic that first computes a solution for the underlying GBACP and then refines it by searching in the extended solution space.
ISSN:0254-5330
1572-9338
DOI:10.1007/s10479-013-1358-8