IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v9y1979i4p24-31.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Preferential Course Scheduling

Author

Listed:
  • Stefan D. Bloomfield

    (School of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331)

  • Michael M. McSharry

    (School of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331)

Abstract

An academic department of a college or university typically constructs its yearly schedule of classes in two stages. First, each faculty member is assigned a set of classes or course sections to teach during the year. Following that days, times, and room numbers are assigned to each course section. These two procedures are almost universally performed manually, demanding various degrees of combinatorial skill and political astuteness on the part of the course scheduler. Depending on the size of the department and the diversity of course offerings, the time required to construct such a schedule of classes can range from a perfunctory afternoon's work to an intensive month-long ordeal.Recent work by Dyer and Mulvey [Dyer, James, John Mulvey. 1976. An integrated optimization/information systems for academic departmental planning. Management Science 22 (12, August) 1332--1341; Dyer, James, John Mulvey. 1977. Computerized scheduling and planning. New Directions for Institutional Research 13 (Spring) 67--86.] has addressed the problem of assigning faculty members to specific classes or course sections. They developed a network flow model that was successfully used to assign faculty members to course sections at the Graduate School of Management at UCLA.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefan D. Bloomfield & Michael M. McSharry, 1979. "Preferential Course Scheduling," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 9(4), pages 24-31, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:9:y:1979:i:4:p:24-31
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.9.4.24
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.9.4.24
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.9.4.24?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jaime Miranda, 2010. "eClasSkeduler: A Course Scheduling System for the Executive Education Unit at the Universidad de Chile," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 40(3), pages 196-207, June.
    2. K A Willoughby & C J Zappe, 2006. "A methodology to optimize foundation seminar assignments," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 57(8), pages 950-956, August.
    3. Ramón Alvarez-Valdés & Francisco Parreño & José Tamarit, 2002. "A tabu search algorithm for assigning teachers to courses," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 10(2), pages 239-259, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    education systems: operations;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:9:y:1979:i:4:p:24-31. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.