Michael Robertson, Keylan Brown
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Raghu Ramanujan
Lena Parker’s (’17) thesis addressed the problem of Socioeconomic segregation in Charlottle-Meckelenburg Schools by using a linear programming model to optimize a function which weighted the relative “good” of two opposing desired characteristics of a school: commute time for each student and diversity of the school. Her approach struggled to run in a reasonable amount of time given the size of the problem, so we attempt to solve the same problem using genetic programming. This method of solving the problem gives no guarantee of an optimal solution, as a linear programming approach theoretically does, but it can give a solution within any time frame, an advantage over Linear Programming.