Aplicação de técnicas de programação linear inteira binária para solucionar o problema de alocação de salas na Universidade Federal do Ceará - Campus Russas

Abstract

At the beginning of each academic term, the Federal University of Ceará - Russas Campus faces the challenge of assigning its classes to the available classrooms. This process must consider the term of each curricular component and the course of each class, the predefined schedules for each of them, and allocate them to the available rooms, taking into account the quantity, capacity, and resources of the rooms. This problem is commonly identified as the Classroom Assignment Problem and is mostly solved manually, requiring days of effort and still not guaranteeing an effective and efficient allocation of spaces. In order to improve this allocation, this study proposed the development of a Binary Integer Linear Programming model focused on minimizing the involved costs to solve this problem for the 2023.2 academic term. The objective is to minimize the variation in the terms of curricular components and courses among the classes allocated in each theoretical classroom, as well as the total number of rooms used, while respecting the constraints of the classroom allocation process. The results obtained demonstrate the feasibility of improving the allocation cost by approximately 23.33% in a short period of time. The allocation proposed by the model reduced the variation in terms of curricular components among the classes allocated in each room by approximately 40.07% and the variation of courses by about 28.80%, compared to manual allocation, in addition to reducing the number of theoretical classrooms used. The study also identified that manual allocation was not feasible for the academic term in question.