Modeling School Facility Requirements in New Communities

This is an exploratory paper developing new formulations for modeling selected social and economic phenomena in a new or existing community. The demand for educational facilities is shown to be dependent on the mix of housing designs and their sequence of construction. A Markov model, cast in a linear programming format, is developed that explores the relation between alternative growth curves of the student population and the housing mix and construction sequence. Objective functions and constraints are formulated that allow for a wide variety of school planning objectives to be related to the housing mix and schedule as defined by market, social, economic or administrative constraints. The use of linear programming models to facilitate the analysis of complex social phenomena is detailed.