A heuristic approach to scheduling assignments for the purpose of evaluating school floorplans

An approach to assignment of scheduled school activities to available space is presented. The assignment process is central to a program which simulates activities on a proposed school floorplan and provides feedback to school designers on the functionality of the designed space. The focus of this research is on open-plan school designs. Observation of open-plan schools showed that a large open space was generally divided and subdivided into a hierarchy of spaces. Thus, assignment of scheduled activities could not be made using standard assignment algorithms. A heuristic approach to the assignment of activities was developed, therefore, and is shown to be an effective means of obtaining reasonable, if not optimal, solutions to the assignment problems.