Course Scheduling to Minimize Student Wait Times For University Buildings During Epidemics.

Epidemic diseases bring many challenges to universities. In the case of airborne contagious diseases like COVID-19, health agencies' guidelines recommend that people maintain a physical distance of about 2 meters from each other. Enforcing such physical distancing on a university campus means that it will potentially take longer for students to get into and out of classrooms and buildings on campus. We use real course registration data from a large US university to study wait times students would encounter to enter and exit campus buildings while keeping the recommended 2 meter physical distance, and show that peak wait times can be longer than 20 minutes. We propose LBCS, a load-balanced course scheduling algorithm that intelligently reduces the peak wait time while ensuring that conflicting classes are scheduled at different times. Through simulations we show that LBCS can reduce the peak wait time by a factor of 3 x, better than naive alternatives such as shifting some classes to the weekend or randomly perturbing class start times.