Practice Summary: Seminar Assignments in a University—MATLAB-Based Decision Support

Abstract

Universities follow a long tradition of assigning students to courses based on student preferences while taking into account constraints such as the rooms to be used. In this context, theoretical approaches aid us in developing algorithms that can be helpful in practice. Our contribution to this subject is a practice summary in which we discuss the most important findings of a project to develop a MATLAB-based stand-alone software system to solve the seminar assignment problem at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. The use of our software at three departments has already enabled annual savings of nearly 20,000 euros in personnel costs, which corresponds to a reduction of around 500 person-hours per year. Apart from important technical aspects of our work, the reported savings potential provides valuable information for making decisions on future similar software projects. History: This paper was refereed.