Student Project Allocation

An implementation of Abraham et al's (2007) algorithm for allocation of student projects. See Abraham et al (2007):

Abraham, D.J., Irving, R.W., and Manlove, D.M. (2007) Two algorithms for the student-project allocation problem. Journal of Discrete Algorithms, 5(1), pp. 73-90. (doi:10.1016/j.jda.2006.03.006)

This code assigns students to projects according to their SPA-student algorithm, given preferences of students for projects, preferences of lecturers for students, and the offerings of projects by lecturers.

The main code is in the bin directory. Input files containing details of the student preferences (students.txt), lecturer preferences (lecturers.txt), and projects offered by lecturers (projects.txt) are placed in the input directory. Example input files are offered.

Utility functions for the algorithm reside in lib/studentAllocation.pm.

To run the code once the input files are in place, run

perl allocate.pl

from the bin directory.

Output files giving the allocations by student (studentsAssignments.txt), by lecturer (lecturerAssignments.txt), and by project (projectAssignments.txt) are generated in the output directory. Examples are given in the output directory.

Students that cannot be allocated by the algorithm will be listed on the first line of the studentAssignments.txt file. Undercapacity projects and lecturers will be given on the first line of their respective files. In cases where students cannot be allocated, turning on random assignment ($randomize = 1) in the script will assign the remaining students to undercapacity projects.