Using An Engineering Analysis Tool for Department Administration

The paper describes a basic application created using Matlab to assist in academic scheduling of technical programs. The work presented is the first iteration of a larger system. For this first phase of the project, the system uses standard (draft) schedule report spreadsheets. These are processed to calculate individual faculty loads, detect conflicts, produce visual schedules, track unstaffed courses, banked credit, etc. More importantly, the analysis uses information about the structure of the curriculum to support cohort oriented scheduling. The project has been implemented in Matlab using Tables. Although other platforms might be better suited to this type of data analysis, the use of Matlab makes it easier to modify and extend in Engineering schools. This is in major part due to the widespread use of Matlab in Undergraduate and Graduate curriculum. The programs described in this paper are available for other schools that would like to use and/or modify for their own purposes.[1]