Forum Discussion
Optimisation problem (assigning group members) solvable with VBA, Solver?
The gradient methods do seem to get stuck. Evolutionary take a long time and I am not sure how well the problem will scale (you may finish by requiring a paid version of the Solver add-in). I have applied constraints to values as part of named ranges 'choice' and 'groupSize' though the latter do not appear to be active (so every student appears to get their first choice).
Thank you so much!
I tried to expand on your solution and changed the tables a bit, created some more groups and 130 dummy students. Also, there are now 140 total spots in all the different classes and I made individual restrictions for each group (They will differ depending on the class type and whether there is one or two identical groups.
Now, it doesn't give me a solution. It says the restrictions cannot be met.
Like you, I had problems with obtaining a feasible starting point; yet it is so easy to achieve manually!
Having moved students from the oversubscribed groups to group 6, I re-ran the optimisation. This did give some improvement to the utility figure but there is no assurance of optimality.