The Simulated Annealing Group Assignment ( SAGA ) Application

The task of assigning students to Critical Inquiry Course (CIC) sections, taking into account the preferences and demographics of the students and the sizes of the sections, is a formidable task by hand and is not trivial to automate. The Simulated Annealing Group Assignment (SAGA) application employs simulated annealing, a stochastic approximation algorithm, to search for an optimal CIC section assignment within a reasonable amount of time. SAGA may be applied not only to the problem of assigning students to CIC sections, but also to a much more general range of group assignment problems.