An Educative Approach to Booth Assignment for a School Carnival

Abstract

School carnival is one of the most important activities for the school anniversary celebration. A good allocation of booths may determine success or failure of this activity. In dealing with the allocation of booths in the school carnival, drawing lots is among the most popular ways to determination of the booth locations. This way is easy to do, but there are some flaws. For example, it leaves out the preferences of the student groups and cannot fulfil most of them. Consequently, quite a lot of students may feel that they are not respected. To improve this situation, we present an educative approach, which is fair and can satisfy the most students' preferences, to booth assignment of a school carnival. First, we provide the layout to student groups to realize where they want to set up their booths. Second, according to their preferences, we present a mathematical model which aims to meet most student groups' preferences. Finally, we employ genetic algorithm (GA) to get feasible solutions. Results based on a number of experiments show that the proposed approach can easily generate a number of good solutions which satisfy the preferences of most student groups.