Abstract
Hopeful Journeys Educational Center faces a daily task of assigning tutors to students subject to myriad complex rules and restrictions. The organization’s mission, which is to provide individualized education to students with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities, as well as its limited operating budget and day-to-day resource/demand variability, makes this a uniquely challenging scheduling problem. When we first communicated with Hopeful Journeys, the organization was in critical need of an efficient methodology for producing daily schedules to replace its existing time-consuming and error-prone manual approach. This paper describes the fully open-source, Excel-based optimization tool we developed to support Hopeful Journeys’ mission. Our work illustrates the potential to use freely available operations research tools within a “rapid prototyping” approach to provide immediate impact to organizations that lack the resources to utilize commercial software or professional consultants.
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