Results: Fall 1998 - Fall 2000

The placement of students by this stochastic technique has been the alternative of choice at UNM since Fall 1999. We summarize our results here by semester:

Fall 1998

Tests comparing the DAO and HMS showed promising results.

Spring 1999

Our approach was presented to Housing Management, gaining approval for a side-by-side trial run for the upcoming fall semester.

Fall 1999

First production run was successful achieving $87.3\%$ student satisfaction -- one of three top dorm choices granted. Unfortunately for the science, the HMS comparison run was not performed due to time constraints, however, many valuable lessons were learned along the way.

Spring 2000

Enhancements were made to the DAO to accommodate aspects unique to the spring semester -- the majority of the students stay in their same rooms with only a few hundred students newly assigned.

Fall 2000

The automated upgrading facility was available for the first time.
Dorm_View, a graphical user interface (GUI) we developed to give the Housing Reservations user the ability to: Visualize assignment results using colored lens for different student and room attributes; customize reports based on halls displayed; and move or switch students with more complete knowledge surrounding the change, was used for the first time (Figure 4.1 on page ).

Production and experimental uses of the DAO have provided many insights into the dorm assignment problem and the simulated annealing solution. These results are covered in Chapter 4.

Chapter 5 concludes with some ideas for future work, from the nearer-term to the speculative.

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