05.04.2024
As you probably already know, there is currently an issue with space on campus. Specifically, many courses are overbooked, meaning the number of students enrolled in the course exceeds the capacity of the assigned classroom.
Following some feedback, the AGEPoly wanted to verify something: when two courses are scheduled at the same time, it would be logical for the course with the larger enrollment to be assigned the larger of the two classrooms being used. Unfortunately, this is not the case for all pairs of courses at EPFL. In particular, for many overbooked courses at EPFL, it is possible for them to simply swap classrooms with another course that has a larger room and a smaller enrollment, thus solving the overbooking issue for that course.
Thus, the representation team has developed a small program to identify all occurrences of overbooked courses that could potentially be resolved or mitigated simply by exchanging their classroom with that of another course occurring at the same time. Results: there are over fifty such occurrences for the Spring semester! More data is available on this public Github repository [link].
Next steps: further analysis and possible improvements to the currently rudimentary optimization algorithm for classroom assignments, followed by a discussion with the AVP-E in the hopes of optimizing classroom assignments for the next academic year.
Project leaders for 2023-2024: Lucie Moulin, Salim Najib – with assistance from Antonin Faure.