The company berufsbildner.ch offers adult education and furthering education classes and seminars. Among their courses are lectures and diploma courses for vocational trainers. berufsbildner.ch is also officially accredited to train Swiss Federation for Adult Learning (SVEB) Practice and Course Instructors.

Organizing and planning the courses for an entire year is a time-consuming and challenging task. The team at berufsbildner.ch offers hundreds of classes, for different topics, all over Switzerland. The teaching staff includes more than 30 teachers. Every teacher has specialized know-how, preferences, quotas, and limited availability. Therefore, finding an optimal schedule that meets all the requirements and respects the preferences of all involved persons is very difficult. As a result, until recently, berufsbildner.ch often spent days constructing the schedule in a manual effort. But even with careful planning, it seemed necessary to hire additional teaching staff on short notice, despite the cost.

To simplify the herculean planning task, Ateleris modeled the entire planning problem mathematically with Mixed Integer Programming. The resulting application imports personnel and course data from Microsoft Excel and produces the ideal schedule in minutes, automatically – every year. By better meeting the preferred quotas of teachers, the hiring of additional teachers is minimized.

Our optimization solution reduces costs, improves course schedules, and respects the preferences of teaching staff and clients.