A Multiperiod School Location Planning Approach with Free School Choice

Abstract

The subject of this paper is a new approach to multiperiod school location planning in urban areas. Most of the existing approaches in the field do not consider free school choice nor are they able to consider substitution effects between school locations. We minimize the location and transport costs with respect to students choosing the school with the highest utility. Since these school choice probabilities (determined by a mixed multinominal logit model) depend on the available schools, we have to consider two steps. First, we generate for each period a set of scenarios indicating which school is open and which is not. For each scenario we allocate the students to available schools according to capacity and utility. Second, we select for each period one scenario in order to minimize total costs. Problems with a long planning horizon and a large number of demand points are solvable. We apply this approach to schools of the City of Dresden, Germany.