Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis of Intensive Courses in a Higher Education Institute: A Bi-objective Pure Integer Programming Model

In this paper, we address the bi-objective cost-volume-profit problem in a higher education institute in order to maximise the session number of intensive courses as well as the profit of all intensive courses during the semester.In this problem, the intensive courses are predefined in the higher educational system and three main sets including a set of several groups of students to be trained in the classroom (1-2 students, 3-5 students, 6-9 students), a set of teacher's degree (master, PhD), and a set of groups of courses (basic/general courses, specialised/main courses, laboratory/workshop courses) are defined in order to classified the parameters, variables, and constraints concerning to the problem.To solve the problem, a bi-objective pure integer programming (PIP) model is extended, and the -constraint multiobjective algorithm is employed to tackle PIP.For this aim, the proposed approach is illustrated by providing 7 real cases.Then, the proposed algorithm on all instances is run, and an optimum Pareto front (non-dominated solutions) is found for each case.Consequently, the computational experiments state that our proposed model and method create an optimised pattern that is applied as a novel approach of the institute to solve the cost-volume-profit problem.