Optimization and Time Management of Weekly Class Schedule with Activity Constraints for College Students using Linear Programming

College students face a multitude of academic responsibilities over the course of their undergraduate studies. It is important for them to manage their time accordingly to accomplish their necessary academic tasks and preserve their personal growth. This paper aims to optimize the amount of time spent on curricular tasks within a week while accounting for the unit load for the term, lecture duration, personal time duration, and sleep duration of the student using Linear Programming. The methodology aims to minimize and maximize the designed objective function to acquire the maximum number of academic working hours of students within a 5-day academic week. The constraints of the model are based on survey results from students and the academic policies of the connected university. The model for both optimization cases is processed using MATLAB software equipped with an optimization toolkit. The results of the program presented an optimal solution of 76 and 119 hours for the minimization and maximization cases, respectively. Overall, the former acquired 44 hours while the latter only gained 1 hour for the maximum number of working hours in a week.