Class scheduling to maximize participant satisfaction

In 1990, the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Virginia undertook a major revision of its MBA curriculum and instituted a new system for course selection. The administration determined that one component of education quality was allowing students to enroll in their preferred courses. Under the new system, no class times are assigned until all students have made their requests for classes. A schedule needed to be constructed that simultaneously met class-size and facility constraints, satisfied faculty time preferences, and maximized the satisfaction of student course requests. The solution technique needed to be quick and flexible, allowing the registrar to test the effects of various scheduling constraints. Integer programming was found to be impractical. The authors developed a local-search heuristic procedure to effectively and efficiently solve this scheduling problem.