Biniyam Asmare Kassa’s research while affiliated with Bahir Dar University and other places

The College of Business and Economics at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia has had phenomenal growth during the past 10 years. This aligns with Ethiopia's aggressive higher education expansion policy. With this growth, however, came complex operational planning problems of which class scheduling is one. The college has customarily solved its class-scheduling problem using a manual approach; however, as it expanded, the manual approach became overly cumbersome and inaccurate. Several schedule revisions were necessary before usable schedules were found. As a result, many courses started late, and some course topics were not covered adequately. To address this situation, we developed a sequential linear integer programming approach to scheduling classes. Using this approach, we generated complete and conflict-free schedules and reduced the time required to construct schedules from one week to less than an hour. We also improved the percentage of morning classes from 50 to 60 percent and significantly reduced room switching. The teaching loads generated achieve a more balanced distribution for instructors, and lectures are spread more evenly across the weekdays per section. We used the system to construct official schedules for the college's first and second semesters of its 2013-2014 academic year.

This paper reports a linear programming approach for placement of applicants to study programs developed and implemented at the college of Business & Economics, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. The approach is estimated to significantly streamline the placement decision process at the college by reducing required man hour as well as the time it takes to announce placement decisions. Compared to the previous manual system where only one or two placement criteria were considered, the new approach allows the college's management to easily incorporate additional placement criteria, if needed. Comparison of our approach against manually constructed placement decisions based on actual data for the 2012/13 academic year suggested that about 93 percent of the placements from our model concur with the actual placement decisions. For the remaining 7 percent of placements, however, the actual placements made by the manual system display inconsistencies of decisions judged against the very criteria intended to guide placement decisions by the college's program management office. Overall, the new approach proves to be a significant improvement over the manual system in terms of efficiency of the placement process and the quality of placement decisions.

In this paper, we report perhaps a first of its kind application of management science in the Ethiopian hotel industry. Avanti Blue Nile Hotels, a newly established five star hotel in Bahir Dar, is the company for which we developed an integer programming model that determines an optimal weekly shift schedule for the Hotel's engineering department personnel while satisfying several constraints including weekly rest requirements per employee, rest requirements between working shifts per employee, required number of personnel per shift, and other constraints. The model is implemented on an excel solver routine. The model enables the company's personnel department management to develop a fair personnel schedule as needed and to effectively utilize personnel resources while satisfying several technical, legal and economic requirements. These encouraging achievements make us optimistic about the gains other Ethiopian organizations can amass by introducing management science approaches in their management planning and decision making systems.