Given by Matthew D. Bailey and Lucas A. Waddell from Bucknell University
Hopeful Journeys Educational Center is a non-profit school providing full-day one-on-one tutoring for students with autism. The hourly assignments of tutors to students are subject to numerous constraints and preference such as student need and availability, teacher availability, qualifications, and team assignments. Working closely with the school-wide scheduler and under a limited budget, we developed a cost-effective, optimization-based daily scheduling support system. The system has become an integral part of their scheduling process saving hours of work each day. In the course of its development and deployment, it provided some interesting modeling and computational challenges.