A classroom/time assignment model

Typically, university classroom space is grossly underutilized as measured by factor such as the number of vacant classroom slots and the percentage of empty seats. This inefficiency is caused, in part, by the propensity of faculty and students to select classes in the prime periods (9 A.M. - 12 and 1 P.M. - 3 P.M.) to the exclusion of alternative time slots. However, another difficulty is the combinatorial size of realistic scheduling problems; most optimization models cannot cope with even example problems. The trend has been to develop pure heuristic techniques. The author has devised a network-based optimizing approach to the classroom/time model which rapidly approximates the solutions. This model combines the insight of the scheduler with combinatorial and searching ability of a computer via a transshipment optimization network model.