Public schools regrouping decision support system. (c1997)

Abstract

The Public Schools Regrouping project is a project initiated by the Ministry of Education. It involves managing and planning (such as regrouping) of schools distribution in Lebanon with the aim of satisfying educational, economical and national criteria. In this work, we have developed a software tool referred to as the Schools Regrouping Decision Support System (SRDSS), that consists of four components: (a) Schools database that contains information about students, teachers, and schools, (b) Towns Database that contains information about the town's population and geographical location, (c) Schools Regrouping Algorithm, and (d) Geographical Information System that help in visualizing data and the algorithm's results. The original contributions of this work are: (a) the formulation of the schools regrouping problem as a weighted graph problem, and (b) the application of the pcenters schools regrouping algorithm to determinehow the current schools, in a userdefined region, can be regrouped to a smaller user-defined number, p, of schools such that user-defined criteria are satisfied. The experimental application of the algorithm to the Aley Caza shows the flexibility of the algorithm in supporting regrouping decisions and gives good results that are clearly consistent with the stated criteria.