1 présentation

• 
  09h00 - 10h00

  Access and equity: the use of optimization models in public school decision-making

  • Karen Smilowitz, prés., Northwestern University

  Optimization models have been used to improve equity and access in public school systems for over fifty years. The talk will explore connections between evolving issues in public education and advances in optimization, computing and geographic information systems, beginning with early work motivated by the Supreme Court decisions to desegregate schools in the United States. The talk will present examples of how operations research has impacted equitable access to education, looking at both the school district design problem and the school bus routing problem. To illustrate the impact of such work, we present a case study from a partnership focused on district redesign to address historic inequities in access to education. We also present ongoing work to develop a series of benchmark instances to be used broadly in the realm of models and solution methods for school operations.