Laboratory Tour Planning Based on the Preference of Students under COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We had been under a COVID-19 Pandemic from 2019 to 2022. Our university department gives a course of lectures in one of which first-grade students visit the laboratories in our department. Therefore, we had to plan the laboratory tour by considering the number of students, the preference of students, the temporal restriction, and preventive measures. In this technical note, we formulated this planning as a mixed integer linear programming problem and optimized the laboratory tour by varying several setting parameters. Finally, we conducted the tours based on the optimization result in 2022 and confirmed our approach's usefulness.