Designing and Explaining a Sustainable Model for the Allocation of Educational Resources at Iran's Railway Engineering Faculty Using a Robust Optimization Approach

Abstract

In the present study, an attempt was made to develop a robust decision model for optimal allocation of resources in the educational planning system of the Faculty of Railway Engineering in Iran. Considering the need to meet the educational demand in Iranian railroad industry and the annual expenditure of the Iranian Railway Engineering University, the main objective of the current study is to design and explain a sustainable model for allocating available resources according to the demand of Iranian railway community. The corresponding offer in the Faculty of Railway Engineering is based on minimising the total fixed and variable costs for educational groups using an optimization approach. Due to the lack of sufficient information on the critical features of budgeting in line with detailed planning, the level of demand and conventional resources are considered as non-deterministic components. Finally, the robust counterpart of the proposed model is compared with the deterministic model, and the results of the sensitivity analysis are presented.