Student-Company Assignment: Simulation Approach

Abstract

Student-Company Assignment is defined as a multi-criteria problem involving the allocation of students to companies according to various criteria. Universities offering workplace experience courses in their undergraduate programs send their students to companies. During this assignment process, allocating suitable students to suitable companies can be a challenging task, as company demands are limited, and certain companies are more preference after by many students. This study proposes a simulation approach to solve the problem. In the first stage of the study, various criteria for students and companies were identified. These criteria include the total number of students, the total number of companies, student preferences, company demands for students, language skills of students, academic grade point averages of students, subject-specific skills of students, language skills demand of companies, and subject-specific skills demand of companies. In the second stage of the study, student-company matching is performed considering these criteria. The SIMIO program was used to model and simulate this process. The contribution of this study to the literature can be summarized as a simulation approach to the student-company assignment problem. The proposed approach was applied to a university offering workplace experience and the results showed an improvement in terms of performance parameters compared to the existing situation.