University course planning and scheduling is the process of determining what courses to offer, how many sections are needed, determining the best term to offer each section, assigning a faculty member to instruct each section, and scheduling each section to a timeslot to avoid conflicts. The result of this task has an impact on every student and faculty member in the department. The process is typically broken down into three major phases: course offering planning, faculty assignment to planned course sections, and course scheduling into timeslots.
This thesis looks at each of these phases for the Industrial and Manufacturing department and brings them together into a decision support and scheduling system. A decision support tool is created to facilitate planning of course offerings. Operations research is applied to assign sections to faculty members using a faculty preference driven integer linear programming model in order to minimize dissatisfaction in the department. Next, the faculty-section pairs are scheduled into university timeslots using a complex integer linear programming model. This scheduling model takes into consideration the faculty member time availability and preferences and general student time slot preferences as it minimizes dissatisfaction while avoiding conflicts among labs, faculty members and courses offered for each class level.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CALPOLY/oai:digitalcommons.calpoly.edu:theses-1339 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Creators | Bellardo, Heather A |
| Publisher | DigitalCommons@CalPoly |
| Source Sets | California Polytechnic State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Master's Theses |
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