Solution method for partitioning students into groups

Abstract This paper considers the problem of partitioning students into groups from both the viewpoints of the students and the laboratories. Based on the idea of goal programming the problem breaks down into a transportation problem and a problem with a similar form. This paper proposes a method which incorporates new procedures into the MODI method for solving the transportation problem. The proposed method was applied to several actual problems and successfully actualized optimal solutions. Moreover, many numerical examples were solved by it in order to show its efficiency. Numerical results show that the computation time increases almost linearly with the number of students and of laboratories,