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Optimal student sectioning on mandatory courses with various sections numbers

  • PATAT 2016
  • Published:
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Abstract

In sufficiently large schools, courses are given to classes in sections of various sizes. Consequently, classes have to be split into various given numbers of sections. We focus on how to dispatch the students into sections of equal size, so as to minimize the number of edges in the resulting conflict graph. As a main result, we show that subdividing the students set in a regular way is optimal. We then discuss our solution uniqueness and feasibility, as well as practical issues concerning teacher assignments to sections and the case of an additional course with unequal section sizes requirements.

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Notes

  1. Although the word “timetabling” usually refers to the whole process of creating a timetable for each student and each teacher, in this paper we call timetabling the task of assigning timeslots to sections, as a problem separate from student sectioning, consisting in assigning students to sections.

  2. For the sake of simplicity, we do not display edges between vertices of the same course, since these potential conflicts can never be realized.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Haute école de gestion de Genève, HES-SO, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland

    David Schindl

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  1. David Schindl
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Correspondence to David Schindl.

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Schindl, D. Optimal student sectioning on mandatory courses with various sections numbers. Ann Oper Res 275, 209–221 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2621-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2621-1

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