Educational planning: a simulation approach for the creation or closure of school classes

In this paper we deal with the problem of the creation or closure of school classes from the perspective of a distance indicator seldom found in the literature: the time needed to travel by road from the family home to the training establishment. Unlike classical deterministic schemes, the originality of this work lies in the use of simulations which take into account the randomness of students’ locations to provide an indication of the variability of the optimal positions for the classes’ creation or closure solutions. We illustrate this with two case studies on postcompulsory education in France.