A Highly Constrained Integer Linear Program with Fuzzy Boundary Conditions for Scheduling in Online Tutoring

Quoc Tien Au, Faiyaz Hasan

2020

Abstract

Scheduling personnel is an important aspect of many organizations and can rapidly become unsustainable to perform manually. It is crucial that the automated algorithm consistently generates a high quality schedule. This paper discusses a linear integer program with a set of constraints, developed in collaboration with a scheduling expert, required to generate reliable schedules for a live online tutoring platform. The focus in the algorithm is shifted away from the optimization of an objective function to adopting hard constraints that guarantee any solution will be sufficiently good. Furthermore, a graceful degradation protocol to implement fuzzy boundary conditions for the constraints ensure that appropriate compromises can be made in most cases to find a solution. Lastly, a comparison of the automated algorithm to a domain expert shows a 5% higher topic coverage and 10% lower cost in favor of the former which has led to a rapid adoption of the automated scheduler by the organization.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Au Q. and Hasan F. (2020). A Highly Constrained Integer Linear Program with Fuzzy Boundary Conditions for Scheduling in Online Tutoring. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES, ISBN 978-989-758-396-4, pages 313-320. DOI: 10.5220/0008919303130320

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icores20,
author={Quoc Au and Faiyaz Hasan},
title={A Highly Constrained Integer Linear Program with Fuzzy Boundary Conditions for Scheduling in Online Tutoring},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,},
year={2020},
pages={313-320},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008919303130320},
isbn={978-989-758-396-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,
TI - A Highly Constrained Integer Linear Program with Fuzzy Boundary Conditions for Scheduling in Online Tutoring
SN - 978-989-758-396-4
AU - Au Q.
AU - Hasan F.
PY - 2020
SP - 313
EP - 320
DO - 10.5220/0008919303130320