Integer programming methods for special college admissions problems

We develop Integer Programming (IP) solutions for some special college admission problems arising from the Hungarian higher education admission scheme. We focus on four special features, namely the solution concept of stable score-limits, the presence of lower and common quotas, and paired applications. We note that each of the latter three special feature makes the college admissions problem NP-hard to solve. Currently, a heuristic based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm is being used in the application. The IP methods that we propose are not only interesting theoretically, but may also serve as an alternative solution concept for this practical application, and also for other ones

Integer programming methods for special college admissions problems

We develop Integer Programming (IP) solutions for some special college admission problems arising from the Hungarian higher education admission scheme. We focus on four special features, namely the solution concept of stable score-limits, the presence of lower and common quotas, and paired applications. We note that each of the latter three special feature makes the college admissions problem NP-hard to solve. Currently, a heuristic based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm is being used in the Hungarian application. The IP methods that we propose are not only interesting theoretically, but may also serve as an alternative solution concept for this practical application, and other similar applications. We finish the paper by presenting a simulation using the 2008 data of the Hungarian higher education admission scheme

Online voluntary mentoring: Optimising the assignment of students and mentors

After the closure of the schools in Hungary from March 2020 due to the pandemic, many students were left at home with no or not enough parental help for studying, and in the meantime some people had more free time and willingness to help others in need during the lockdown. In this paper we describe the optimisation aspects of a joint NGO project for allocating voluntary mentors to students using a web-based coordination mechanism. The goal of the project has been to form optimal pairs and study groups by taking into the preferences and the constraints of the participants. In this paper we present the optimisation concept, and the integer programming techniques used for solving the allocation problems. Furthermore, we conducted computation simulations on real and generated data for evaluate the performance of this dynamic matching scheme under different parameter settings

Online voluntary mentoring: Optimising the assignment of students and mentors

After the closure of the schools in Hungary from March 2020 due to the pandemic, many students were left at home with no or not enough parental help for studying, and in the meantime some people had more free time and willingness to help others in need during the lockdown. In this paper we describe the optimisation aspects of a joint NGO project for allocating voluntary mentors to students using a webbased coordination mechanism. The goal of the project has been to form optimal pairs and study groups by taking into account the preferences and the constraints of the participants. In this paper, we present the optimisation concept and the integer programming techniques used for solving the allocation problems. Furthermore, we conducted computational simulations on real and generated data to evaluate the performance of this dynamic matching scheme under different parameter settings

Integer programming methods for special college admissions problems

Abstract. We develop Integer Programming (IP) solutions for some special college admission problems arising from the Hungarian higher education admission scheme. We focus on four special features, namely the solution concept of stable score-limits, the presence of lower and common quotas, and paired applications. We note that each of the latter three special feature makes the college admissions problem NP-hard to solve. Currently, a heuristic based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm is being used in the application. The IP methods that we propose are not only interesting theoretically, but may also serve as an alternative solution concept for this practical application, and other similar applications