Academics / Undergraduate Program / Client Project Challenge / ProjectAutomated Scheduling Platform for Attea Middle School
The main problem our client, Attea Middle School, is facing is the tedious task of manually generating 800+ student schedules. This project takes around 160 hours to complete over the summer and is incredibly inefficient. Each student’s schedule is complex and requires a wide range of personalizations such as math placement, global language preference, or an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). The schedules must also ensure that a student’s classes do not overlap, class size constraints are met, and classes are balanced in gender. A solution to this problem would allow more time to be allocated towards other important projects, remove the need for future training in creating the schedules during administrative transition, and remove sources of human error or bias.
Our proposed solution is an automated service platform that streamlines the process of scheduling. The user uploads student, team, and course data, and the platform will automatically generate optimal student schedules and output them into an easy-to-read Excel file. The platform utilizes both Python and AMPL to accomplish this difficult task, and was tested using data from the 2020-2021 academic year.
A full report on this project is available by request to jill.wilson@northwestern.edu.
Team Members: Caroline Christensen, James Jia, Brian Kim, Maya Zakarin, Peyton Zona
Advisor: Prof. Andreas Wächter