(Caroline Bork, Jan Cloutier, Andrew Stewart, 2000)
Young Life is an international non-profit organization that acts as an outreach to adolescents. A main focus of the organization is summer camping at their US. camps. Scheduling over 670 different areas to attend 22 camps during the 12 weeks of the summer is an arduous task if performed manually. In the past they have done this process by hand through a series of meetings for allocation of camp spots. Although time consuming and rather costly, their current scheduling process has worked relatively well in the past due to the fairly stagnant size of the overall Young Life summer camp population, as well as due to the consistent camp requests among most groups. Group assignments typically did not change significantly from year to year in both geographic preference and timing. However, with a new growth initiative in both camper groups and camp facilities, a more efficient and automated system is necessary to cope with future growth.
The CBS group formulated a model that ensured that Young Life's primary goal was attained, specifically that as many people are able to attend camps as possible, while paying special attention to group preferences. We developed a software package, Young Life Scheduling Software (YLSS), that fully integrates a database and solver system in an easy to use program that accomplishes all of Young Life's desired scheduling tasks. In addition, we tested the scheduling solution with a realistic test case based on augmented 1999 camp attendance data.
Based upon our findings and analysis, our group recommends that the modified scheduling procedure and modified scheduling process both be implemented immediately. In addition, our group recommends that the following courses of action be further investigated: incorporate penalties for previous year's choices, constrain the booking of early and late summer, provide web based forms, provide enhanced MS Access reporting, and lastly, invest in a MS Office compatible solver.