A linearized model for academic staff assignment in a Brazilian university focusing on performance gain in quality indicators

Private Higher Education Institutions (HEI) often have shares in stock markets to attract investment. A key element for a good appreciation on the market is a good evaluation in performance indicators of academic quality. In Brazil a main component of such academic quality indicators is directly computed after the assignment of faculty members to courses. We develop mathematical models to support decision making in the assignment of faculty members to courses in a private HEI in Brazil. It turns out that the original problem is a nonlinear integer programming problem, and to deal with large instances found in practice we propose to use a linearized model instead. We conduct computational experiments with two main purposes: to evaluate the quality of the solutions obtained with the linear integer model when compared to the ones obtained with the original nonlinear integer model, and to evaluate the potential of gains with the linear integer model when compared to actual assignments. In the latter case numerical results on real instances from the HEI under study show the proposed approach effective to improve the indicators of the HEI due to a better assignment of faculty members to courses than observed in practice.