A decision support model for scheduling exhibition projects in art museums

The main purpose of scheduling exhibition projects for art museums is to provide the visitors with more exhibitions and to utilize the galleries as fully as possible. Because the combinations of possible exhibitions for all galleries at any given time are numerous, it is difficult for the art museum’s planner to make an optimal decision. Therefore, this paper developed a decision support model with genetic algorithms, called SCHEMA (SCHeduling Exhibitions for Museum of Art). In the model the galleries are the resource which the exhibitions utilize in the sequence of their priority values. The model’s evaluation shows to be significantly effective in planning time, percent usage of the gallery, and the number of exhibitions scheduled. Because all the complex computations are done by the model, the decision making process of the scheduling stage is speeded up considerably.