: The ballroom dancing showcases at Fred Astaire East Side Dance Studio in Manhattan are held at least twice a year and provide the students with an environment for socializing, practice, and improvement. The most important part of a showcase organization is the construction of the dance presentations timetable, and, with the number of participants increasing each year, this task (usually performed manually) requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of the management. That is why, for the Summer 2007 showcase, the management of the studio expressed interest in using a computer-based tool that would significantly speed up the process of schedule construction and deliver a much more coherent and efficient showcase program. The tool we developed is rooted in coding of algorithms and integer programming optimization models and is very user-friendly since it is spreadsheet-based and runs in Excel, while taking into consideration the various constraints and requirements posed by t...
Miguel A. Lejeune, Nevena Yakova