Covering the classroom requirements for the schools of Hamburg

The city of Hamburg expects for the next years enormously increasing rates of pupils. Covering the additional need of classrooms by new building is very expensive. It would be better to avoid this by making good use of the existing resources. The possible steps for covering the requirements and the restrictions are explained subsequently. There are a lot of alternatives, which must be coordinated for a ‘good’ solution in a suitable way. The mathematical model for this problem is described furthermore. The model in question belongs to the class of mixed integer problems. Finally the standard optimization software SCICONIC, which is used for solving the mixed integer problem, is introduced and the embedding of SCICONIC into the architecture of the evolved planning system is described. Because the users of the system are officers without knowledge in electronic data processing and mathematical programming, a user friendly interface is of special importance in this case. This paper does not include new mathematical cognition, but describes the skilled use of known OR-techniques in a real software project.