Simulated Annealing for the Route Planning of Advisors in the RMUTL Cooperative Education Program
Keywords:
Cooperative education program;, simulated annealing heuristic, mixed-integer linear programmingAbstract
The Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna (RMUTL) is Thailand's leading university in the field of science and technology. The university focuses on producing graduates who are ready for workplaces through a hands-on learning system. RMUTL incorporates a Cooperative Education Program (CO-OP) in the learning system which aims to gives students an opportunity to receive career training in industries. The students in the final academic year are required to attain this program for a semester to be prepared for the workplace. During the students’ internship period, the RMUTL CO-OP has a team of advisors who need to visit those students in the industries at least two times to give the students advice on their projects and working life. The current visiting plan is created based on the planner experience which sometimes ineffective in term of costs. Therefore, in this study, a mixed-integer linear programming model is formulated to help the planner find an optimal route for the advisors. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the advisor's visitation. Moreover, we propose a simulated annealing heuristic (SA) to solve the problem. We generate benchmark instances and solved them by SA. Computational results show the excellent performance of SA in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency.
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