A support tool for planning classrooms considering social distancing between students

In this paper, we present the online tool http://salaplanejada.unifesp.br, developed to assist the layout planning of classrooms considering the social distancing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We address both the fixed and non-fixed position seat allocation problems. For the first case, we use two integer optimization models and discuss some curiosities about the solutions found. For the case that the seats can be moved freely, we handle the problem with circle packing techniques using continuous non-linear optimization. For these instances, we propose new algorithms, following other packing problems approaches in the literature. In addition, we propose a fast heuristic that provides a good starting point for the optimization procedure and also an efficient configuration ensuring the students positions in lines, which may be of interest to the user. Computational results are presented to illustrate the numerical behavior of the algorithms and models.