Conversion of Regular State Schools into Technical Schools: An Approach in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro via Integer Programming

In the last years, a crescent interest in technical courses occurred in Brazil. There are even measures from the federal government to improve access to these kinds of courses, including creating new campi to offer them. However, there is a need to evaluate the companies in the neighborhood, aiming to offer courses related to their activities, to smooth the transition and help the graduates find a job. This work proposes a linear integer programming model to suggest regular schools that could be transformed into technical schools, based on their distances to neighborhoods and clusters of companies. Experiments were run in data from the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro and the city of Rio de Janeiro, and their results made it possible to evaluate from different points of view which would be the best schools to convert and which kind of courses they could offer.