Modelling and Solving Generic Educational Timetabling Problems.

大学有大量的学生参加许多不同的学习项目。他们还雇佣了大量的工作人员来促进这些课程的教学。最终，一个单独的事件，如讲座或研讨会，需要在特定的时间在特定的空间发生。这个作业以时间表的形式呈现，目的是产生一个每个人都满意的时间表。从这个描述中产生了两个问题：你如何量化一个时间表有多好？你如何制定一个好的时间表？这项研究的新工作将是管理人们如何在校园里走动，如何有效地利用物理空间，以及考虑越来越受欢迎的“虚拟”在线空间。这将通过数学形式形成问题并研究可用于解决它的方法来完成。一个更广泛的研究问题是，这项工作是否可以用来指导战略决策。战略决策是改变组织长期运作的决策。其目的是建立时间表问题与大学必须做出的战略决策之间的牢固关系。与麻省理工学院合作。

Universities have a large number of students enrolled on many different programs of study. They also employ lots of staff to facilitate the teaching of these courses. Ultimately, an individual event, such as a lecture or a workshop, needs to occur in a particular space at a particular time. This assignment is represented as a timetable and the aim is to produce a timetable that everyone is happy with. Two questions arise from this description: How do you quantify how good a timetable is and how do you produce a timetable that is good? The novel work within this research will be to manage how people move around campus and use physical space efficiently as well as consider "virtual" online spaces which are becoming more popular. This will be done by mathematically forming the problem and researching methods that can be used to solve it. A broader research question is to ask if this work can be used to guide strategic decision making. A strategic decision is one that changes the long-term operation of an organisation. The aim is to establish a firm relationship between the timetabling problem and the strategic decisions that universities have to make.In partnership with MIT.