Elective course assignment problem: a revenue management based approach

Abstract

The current paper aims to provide a novel approach for the assignment of students to elective courses using historical records of course capacities and student demand. With this aim, we establish a link between the course assignment problem and the airline seat allocation modeling of Revenue Management. An analogy is set up relying on the assumption that the students form distinct groups and intend to enroll in the elective courses with limited capacities, which is similar to different classes of customers to purchase tickets for the flights with limited capacities. We illustrate the proposed idea in a real-world case utilizing the historical demand and capacity data of a public university in which the senior students have priority in enrolling. The results of the proposed modeling can serve not only for capacity allocations to the courses but also offers suggestions to evaluate the potential capacity augmentation or reduction decisions.

Keywords:

• Course assignment
• student sectioning
• revenue management
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Course Assignment problem is also referred to as Student-Course Assignment (Laporte and Desroches 1986; Sabin and Winter 1986), Student Scheduling (Schaerf 1999; Van den Broek et al. 2009) or Student Sectioning (Müller and Murray 2010).

2 Revenue Management is also referred to as Yield Management, Demand Management or Revenue Optimization (see Talluri and Van Ryzin 2006 for synonymous names of Revenue Management).

3 Post-Enrollment and Curriculum-Based concepts (see http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007).