Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Uses Integer Programming for Scheduling Weekly Assessment Activities

The Bologna Declaration became the guiding document of the Bologna Process, which led to the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) to coordinate higher education across Europe. The Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales (ETSII) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid adopted one of its pillars: a student-centered learning model. This new model requires the adaptation of existing docent methodologies and the development of tools to monitor student achievements by means of continuous assessment. The implementation of this approach in bachelor’s degree programs was especially complex because of the considerable number of students and subjects involved. To meet EHEA requirements, ETSII’s board of directors and the school’s academic committee designed and implemented a method to implement periodic assessment activities for all degree programs. This method entailed a large number of activities across all courses that had to be scheduled to ensure that all requirements would be met. The schedule was generated manually until the volume of activities increased such that manual scheduling was no longer viable. To address this problem, we implemented two integer programming models, which we have successfully applied since the 2013–2014 academic year.