Examples - Housing Assignment

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Our client is the registrar at a small technical college specializing in the visual arts. They offer intensive courses ranging in duration from two to four weeks, attracting students from around the world. These students need temporary housing during their residence. The college owns some housing units and also reserves blocks of space in nearby motels and private homes. The unit occupancies are a mix of singles and doubles, offered by the college at varying price levels, with or without meals, to students.

Our task was to give registry clerks a tool, within the existing Visual Foxpro application, for assigning beds to students.

• Assignments are constrained by many factors, including:
  • The college's desire to assign first, the space that they own.
  • The students' preferences for price level, privacy, and roommate gender.
  • The need to pack rooms, in order to keep space available for longer-term occupancies.

This is not a task that can be fully automated. We designed a flexible system that gives registry clerks options, from which they make informed selections.

• The assignment process works like this for a registry clerk:
  1. from the student's record window, the clerk requests a housing assignment for a particular date range.
  2. the system searches for available beds that meet the student's preferences.
  3. the system presents a list of available beds (partially-filled rooms at the top; college-owned next)
  4. if no beds are available, the clerk changes preferences and the system searches again.
  5. the clerk may request that the list be ranked. This ranking will assign a numerical score to each potential assignment. The score for a bed reflects how many large blocks of unassigned dates would be left in the housing inventory if the bed were to be assigned for the selected dates.
  6. the clerk, possibly consulting with the student by telephone, makes the assignment from the list.

It is worth noting that we do not automatically present the clerk with a ranked list. Early in the season, with many beds available in the inventory, there will be little difference in rankings. Later in the season, however, preserving large blocks of unassigned dates will be more important, especially if there are four-week courses occurring then, and ranking differences within the reduced inventory will be greater.

By giving the clerk the option to rank listed choices, we reduce network traffic for this data-intensive task, and maintain a responsive multi-user system.