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Operations Research Papers
Using the SAS/OR OPTMODEL Procedure to Assign Students to Schools In the Wake County Public School System
Ivan Oliveira, Rob Pratt; SAS Institute; Charles Dulaney, Wake County Public School System, 2009
Abstract
With over 137,000 students and 156 schools, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is the largest in North Carolina and the eighteenth largest in the United States. Each year, WCPSS faces the problem of assigning students to schools, using multiyear student population forecasts. The main goals are to reduce county-wide: socioeconomic imbalance among neighborhood schools, overcrowding, travel time, and the number of students reassigned to different schools from year to year.
These goals must be achieved while adhering to numerous constraints, which include limits on student demographics by region, limits on school-specific capacities, and the observance of predetermined special assignments. WCPSS needed to automate this previously manual assignment process in order to efficiently evaluate different policies and decisions and quickly propose new assignments.
Using the SAS/OR OPTMODEL procedure, we developed an optimization engine to solve this problem. We used SAS® Grid Manager to generate multiple solutions for analysis and SAS/GIS® to visualize the recommended assignments on county geographical maps. Throughout the analysis, we used JMP® for design of experiments and visualization of optimization results. This presentation explores the formulation and solutions of our approach.
