University space planning and space-type profiles

Universities planning the provision of space for their teaching requirements, need to do so in a fashion that reduces capital and maintenance costs whilst still providing a high quality level of service. Space plans should aim to provide sufficient capacity without incurring excessive costs due to over-capacity. A simple measure used to estimate over-provision is utilisation. Essentially, the utilisation is the fraction of seats that are used in practice, or the ratio of demand to supply. However, studies usually find that utilisation is low, often only 20-40%, and this is suggestive of significant over-capacity. Our previous work has given methods to improve such space planning. They identify a critical level of utilisation as the highest level that can be achieved whilst still reliably satisfying the demand for places to allocate teaching events. In this paper, we extend such work to incorporate the notions of event-types and space-types. Teaching events have multiple ‘event-types’, such as lecture, tutorial or workshops, and there are generally corresponding space types. Matching the type of an event to a room of a corresponding space type is generally a soft constraint. However, realistically, allocation happens in a mixed spacetype environment where, teaching events of a given type 1 Manuscript Click here to download Manuscript: space-type-profiles.pdf Click here to view linked References