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Elective course student sectioning at Danish high schools

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Abstract

The Elective Course Student Sectioning (ECSS) problem is a yearly recurrent planning problem at the Danish high schools. The problem is of assigning students to elective classes given their requests such that as many requests are fulfilled and the violations of the soft constraints are minimized. This paper presents an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search heuristic for the ESCC. The algorithm is applied to 80 real-life instances from Danish high schools and compared with solutions found by using the state-of-the-art MIP solver Gurobi. The algorithm has been implemented in the commercial product Lectio, and is thereby available for approximately 200 high schools in Denmark.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Michael Bigom Herold from MaCom A/S for kindly helping determining the problem and setting the weights for the problem, and MaCom A/S for providing all the data.

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  1. Section of Operations Research, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Building 426, Produktionstorvet, 2800 , Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

    Simon Kristiansen & Thomas R. Stidsen

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  1. Simon Kristiansen
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  2. Thomas R. Stidsen
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Correspondence to Simon Kristiansen.

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Kristiansen, S., Stidsen, T.R. Elective course student sectioning at Danish high schools. Ann Oper Res 239, 99–117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1593-7

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