Improving the Room-Size Profiles of University Teaching Space

The utilisation of University teaching space is notoriously low: rooms are often unused, or only half full. We expect that one of the reasons for this is overall mismatch the sizes of rooms and the sizes events. For example, there might be an excess of large rooms. Good space planning should match the set of rooms to the set of events whilst taking account of the pedagogic requirements of the institution. We give methods to visualise and demonstrate the mismatch between the event and room-size profiles. We then provide methods to generate better room profiles. In particular, a method to produce robust room profiles. The method is based on scenario-based ideas of stochastic programming. We give evidence that such robust room profiles allow the reliable achievement of higher levels of utilisation.