Um estudo sobre soluções de otimização para elaboração de ofertas no âmbito acadêmico

Abstract

The allocation of instructional offerings aren’t a trivial process. At each beginning of an academic session, it’s necessary to create a new allocation scheme for classes into rooms that meet their preferences, comply with their restrictions and that are able to bear the student body. Solving the Classroom Assignment Problem manually is still common practice. This process, in addition to being complex, takes a lot of time and doesn’t guarantee a good result. There’s a great academic effort looking for satisfactory solutions to the problem and several techniques have already been developed. This study presents a survey of the techniques capable of automating the room allocation process and proposes, within the solutions found, the one most apt to solve the problem. Two software products, with the objective of generating a solution, were tested and compared for their ability to create a valid arrangement and for the quality of their results. SALAS is a application created to meet the allocation needs of the academic community in the Technology Center of the Federal University of Ceará, which even with a simple techinique is able to solve the problem. In contrast, the UniTime system was created to solve the problem in a generic academic setting and uses more elaborate optimization techniques and a wide variety of configurations to generate more meaningful results.