Pikaru - Pick a room to study in

At the Politecnico Leonardo campus, it was often hard to find some place to study in. Politecnico does provide a website that lists free classrooms based on specific dates and time slots, for which a former student implemented a Telegram bot, making the whole process simpler. However, these tools still make it hard to plan for a whole day of study, since rooms are often not free all day.

This project then aims to implement an algorithm and interface that optimises a full day study session, choosing rooms to stay in based on their occupation and the student’s schedule, while minimising displacement between rooms. Ideally, it’d also allow the student to set a preference for specific rooms, or rooms with specific features (e.g. plugs).

This project was inspired by the use of Integer Linear Programming to optimise classroom allocation in USPolis.

A Journey Through Integer Linear Programming Land

Linear Programming is a powerful modelling tool which lets you efficiently find optimal solutions to problems described as a linear objective function and linear constraints on a set of so called decision variables, i.e. what you want to optimise. Integer Linear Programming is just that but applied to problems with integer decision variables rather than continuous ones. It’s usually through (binary) integer values that you are able to describe conditional statements in your model. A first (wrong) model Ignoring lecture presence constraints, the problem can be modelled as ...