Designing a Mathematical Model for Allocating Budget to University Research and Educational Goals: A Case Study in Shahed University

Abstract

Institutions of higher education, both public and private, are among the most important institutions of a country. Several economic factors have forced them to act for improving the cost-effectiveness of their activities and the quality of their products (outputs) is strongly expected. Such issues have led universities to focus on profit-making activities and commercialization like manufacturing industries. This propensity is grounded in the fact that manufacturing industries working under an efficient management system can produce very high-quality products. As a matter of fact, there is no such a model for academic contexts. Therefore, this paper is aimed at offering such a model. The coefficients and constants used in this model have all been extracted based on analyzing research and educational aspects of Shahed University. The proposed model is a lexicographic model which has thirty six decision variables that are broken down into two classes of university sources variables (fifteen) and university products variables. The model also includes forty nine goals, seven structural constraints and twenty integer variables. At the end of the paper, the current situation is compared with the recommended one and it shows that many of the variables are suboptimal except variables of research and educational officials (S9), graduate (P7) and PhD (P9) night course students number. The comprehensiveness of this model enables managers to plan the smallest research and educational activities and the solutions can be used by managers as applied guidelines.

Keywords

• Quantitative approach
• Resource allocation
• Integer lexicographic goal programming
• Manufacturing industries