Siena College: Course Scheduling for the Business Analytics Department

Dr. Arthur Pierre was responsible for developing a course schedule for the Business Analytics Department at Siena College. He needed to determine which professor would teach a particular class section in a particular time slot for the Spring 2020 semester. Pierre barely survived the last round of course scheduling due to the compressed delivery time from five weeks to three weeks in the previous cycle. This was one of his most sensitive and challenging responsibilities as he had to consider student demand, administrative requirements and faculty preferences in the process of developing a schedule. The importance of the decision and the stressful problems that he had encountered in adjusting to the new timeline necessitated a more systematic approach to scheduling since the shortened timeframe would be implemented for the foreseeable future. His ad hoc approach was too time consuming because he had to incorporate multiple factors into his course schedule and that often required reworking the entire schedule each time he encountered a conflict. In collaboration with a colleague, they identified a potential solution. They needed to prioritize constraints and build an integer linear optimization model.