(Drew Hall, Michael Chiang, Emily Krannich, Sean Vanlandingham, 1998)
Each semester, the CSE department at SMU faces the problem of matching TAs with scheduled lab times. Currently, Mary Alys Lillard and Beth Minton spend over 80 man-hours per semester manually matching TAs with over 60 lab sections. The CSE department schedules labs, oftentimes occurring simultaneously, every weekday between the hours of 8:00 AM and 7:00 PM. The process of assigning TAs to lab sections is bounded by several constraints including schedule agreement, skill level, prior experience, maximum and minimum number of labs to teach, classification, and language ability. Nurad Technologies, Inc. is a small defense company that builds many different types of products that go on other company's products. An example is a composite (type of fiberglass) shield that contains radar jamming equipment and fits into the wings of Lockheed Martin's F15 Fighter Jets.