Application of a Heuristic-Based System for Sustainable Faculty Routing and Workload Balancing in Cooperative Education
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Abstract
In cooperative education programs, faculty supervisors are required to visit multiple industry sites hosting students, with each site imposing a distinct workload characterized by the number of assigned students, travel distance, and on-site activities. This study formulates the supervisory routing task as a Set Partitioning Vehicle Routing Problem with Equitable Workload Constraints (SPVRP-EW) and introduces a three-phase heuristic approach. The first phase generates feasible one-day trips within a strict time window constraint. The second phase selects a minimum set of trips that covers all locations using a greedy set-cover strategy with an efficiency-based tie-breaking rule. The final phase assigns the selected trips to six faculty supervisors to minimize the maximum–minimum workload gap while ensuring that each supervisor is responsible for an equal number of main trips. Using a real dataset of 24 placement sites across four provinces in Thailand, the proposed method generated 12 trips totaling 2,399.5 km. The solution achieved a maximum–minimum workload gap of only 2 points and a workload variance of 0.58. Extended experiments further demonstrate that the method outperforms two simulated manual plans, as well as random-cover and random-assignment baselines, in terms of total distance, number of trips, and workload variance. The heuristic remains robust under ±5–10% distance noise, with the workload gap staying within 4 points. In addition, synthetic instances with 50 and 100 locations can be solved in under one second, confirming their practical scalability. Relaxing the equity threshold beyond 2 points does not yield further improvement, indicating that the heuristic is already optimal for the studied instance. Overall, the framework serves as a decision-support tool that enhances both logistical efficiency and social sustainability by improving workload fairness in cooperative education supervision.
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