The seminar will be discussing how Operations research methods have been used to identify and evaluate solutions to the reconfiguration of public-school attendance area boundaries for over fifty years. In broad terms, the school redistricting problem seeks to find capacity-feasible assignments of students in a school district to local schools. This talk will present analysis of the use of operations research for school districting. The talk will feature a review of the literature, exploring connections between evolving issues in public education and advances in optimization, computing and geographic information systems.
Dr. Karen Smilowitz is the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the Operations group at the Kellogg School of Business. She is an expert in modeling and solution approaches for logistics and transportation systems in both commercial and non-profit applications, working with transportation providers, logistics specialists and a range of non-profit organizations. Dr. Smilowitz is the founder of the Northwestern Initiative on Humanitarian and Non-Profit Logistics. She has been instrumental in promoting the use of operations research within the humanitarian and nonprofit sectors through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as various media outlets.