University of Birmingham Laboratory Modelling

The University of Birmingham was founded in 1900 by Royal Charter, as a new model for higher education. This was England’s first civic or ‘redbrick’ university, where students from all religions and backgrounds were accepted on an equal basis. The university supports over 34,000 students, with 100,000 online learners and 4,000 international students.

The Challenge

The University was embarking on a £606m investment in the Estate. This included the Aston Web Student Hub, the Library, the Sports Centre, and new residences along with teaching spaces and the Collaborative Training Laboratory (CTL). In parallel, the university wanted to increase student numbers by 5% per year over the following 5 years. This essentially led to the need to identify the supply and demand on current facilities throughout the estate works, along with the impact on the management of exams and scenario planning of the timetable and scheduling for the new CTL facility to be shared by several faculties and across many courses.

This case study outlines the work to model how the newly proposed specialised Collaborative Teaching Laboratory (CTL) building could best accommodate the needs of all the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teaching departments within the University, from the current separate older and out of date faculty Laboratory buildings in terms of specialised lab classes and exercises.

The Solution

EventMAP deployed the software to model the new lab classes and their specific CTL requirements and created a model schedule within the new proposed space, taking into account potential clashes with the existing lecture and other events. The lecture events took the current timetabled delivery of the curriculum and associated student enrolments. It then increased these by 5% for the future 5 years to provide a future indication on the CTL facilities use. A total of 36,559 events were input to the modelling software. Then a cleansing of the data was undertaken to remove events that did not need the CTL space or allied lecture space. These events were locked into their existing time/resources to ensure the timetable developed for the STEM faculties still integrated with the wider university curriculum timetable across all other faculties.

The events which were to be re-located to the CTL building were replaced with a new set of events for the departments which require the new specialised space. This amounted to 356 events to be scheduled in the timetabling and scheduling of the CTL use. Further constraints were identified and included into the timetables, for example where 35 events had very specific time/room requirements (for Chemistry and Mathematics), within the overall use of the CTL.