A scheduling model for the U.S. Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School

Abstract

This thesis presents a mixed integer program (MIP) to schedule sequences of classes attended by Marines at the Marine Corps Communication- Electronics School in order to qualify them for communications and electronics military occupational specialties. The schedule determines the starting dates and the number of students to enroll in each instance or class of various course types. The courses follow a specific sequence and many classes of a course may be scheduled within a fiscal year. Students attend one or more of the courses and may wait some time for a class of a subsequent course to convene. The objective of the MIP is to reduce the amount of delay students incur while waiting for classes of additional courses to start in the sequence. Due to the size and complexity of the model, the MIP initially schedules classes with a weekly resolution but then adjusts the starting dates to produce a daily schedule. For 1993 data, the MIP is solved in less than 10 minutes on a desktop computer (80486 processor at 66MHz with at least 64M RAM) and produces a schedule which has 62% less delay than the actual schedule for that year