Problema de alocação de salas e a otimização dos espaços no Centro de Tecnologia da UFSM

Abstract

Every beginning of semester higher education institutions face the same dilemma: to assignment courses to classrooms keeping up certain restrictions. This problem is known as Classroom Assignment Problem or Rooms Allocation Problem and consists of allocating courses, with schedules established, at classrooms considering the room capacity and the needs of teachers and students. This process usually is solved manually by the institutions, which can take several days to complete, besides it is hard work and often does not guarantee the efficient allocation of spaces. This reality is also faced by the Technology Center of the Federal University of Santa Maria that due to increasing demand and expansion of the institution needs to adapt to efficiently allocate the available spaces. Currently, the center has 14 undergraduate courses divided into three buildings that have 47 rooms, effectively used, with capacities ranging between 25 and 50 students. Thereby, the aim of this study is to propose a new configuration for the allocation of classrooms in the Technology Center at the Federal University of Santa Maria in order to make the most efficient use of space. Therefore, the study has the support of the precepts of operational research so that a mathematical model was developed to represent the problem. Were used as reference the courses offered in the first and second half of 2014 and from these databases built were coded in ZIMPL and implemented with CPLEX. Because of the problem size, it was decided to split the databases on weekdays and shifts (morning and afternoon) totaling 20 instances. Overall, the results meets the proposed objectives to optimize the spaces and also demonstrated some nonconformities as between the number of vacancies offered by the disciplines and capabilities of rooms. In addition, it was found that there is some imbalance in the supply of disciplines as the days and timeslots, which consequently leads to difficulties for classrooms assignment. Furthermore, it is suggested that further studies are conducted, especially with the use of metaheuristics in order to test the quality of these solutions.